Oklahoma bowhunter Max Wynn was sitting in a ground blind with his wife Hartley, not far from a big river bottom in central Oklahoma the evening of October 17. Eventually, he spotted a nice 8-point buck (which was his target deer) and it walked to within just 10 yards of his blind.
“I wanted to take a close [shot at the] buck with my recurve bow, but as I started to draw it, the buck spooked a bit and moved out to 25 yards,” the 24-year-old archer tells Outdoor Life. “I set the recurve bow down, picked up my 75-pound draw weight compound bow, drew it, and released an arrow.
“When I did, it sounded like a cannon went off inside my blind. I set the bow down and saw the string serving was split, the bow string was slack, and both bow cams were bent.”
The arrow that Wynn loosed only flew about 8 yards and hit the dirt. The lighted nock flew farther than the arrow that it was on.
The bow essentially exploded in his hands, bruising his wrist. Otherwise he was unscathed, though he said he was lucky the broken bow limbs didn’t hit his face.
“The bow limb could have hit the top of my ground blind when I shot my arrow, and that may have caused the bow to explode like it did,” says Wynn, a compression therapist and waterfowl guide for Tine Flies Outfitters. “I was done for the evening and immediately went to Cabela’s and bought a Bear Archery compound bow setup.”
Wynn rigged his Bear bow and sighted it in on targets at home in the truck headlights. The next morning he was back in his ground blind, and shortly a doe came into range at 28 yards. He took the deer with a well-placed arrow.
“That gave me confidence in using that Bear bow, and I went back to the same ground blind that evening with my brother-in-law Maddox Allbright,” Wynn says. “He’s 17 and wanted a doe for the youth deer season. But he decided to wait before taking a doe to see if the 8-point buck I was after came back into the area.”
Indeed, the big buck did come back – following another smaller buck.
“He walked in on the same trail where the doe came that morning, but when he got to where I shot her, he skirted the spot and went a little wider from my blind,” Wynn says. “But he offered a 30-yard quartering away shot. It was a good hit, and he only traveled 35 yards before falling.”
They got the 186-pound 8-pointer out of the woods, and Wynn started processing the buck.
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“I was working my knife on the deer near the ribs by its shoulder and felt something sharp,” Wynn says. “I dug around and pulled out a Slick Trick broadhead that was buried in its chest cavity.
“There were no marks on the outside of the buck’s hide from an arrow wound. The tissue all around the broadhead was healed. The deer looked perfectly healthy before I shot it. Just shows how tough whitetails are.”
Wynn says he was lucky in dressing his 8-pointer that he didn’t cut his hands on the broadhead buried in the deer.
“I think I used up a lot of my deer hunting luck during those two days in the ground blind, and then dressing the buck with another broadhead inside,” he says lightheartedly.