At the moment of truth in the deer stand in Washington County, when Cory Holman was poised to let an arrow fly with his crossbow at 63 yards, he knew the deer was a big one, but not one that would shake him to his soul.

“I kept telling myself to breathe,” Holman said.

He fired and exhaled and the biggest deer he has killed in more than a quarter century of hunting tumbled to the earth in a soybean field, lying still, the arrow entering the left front shoulder. The weather was slightly crisp on the early November day, temperature in the high 40s, the wind just right in the mid-afternoon after hours of waiting to target the right deer.

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He counted 14 deer milling around or passing through near him in the woods, but not the buck he sought, even if Holman was sure one of significant antler proportions and bulk was haunting the neighborhood.

“I knew there was a big animal in there,” he said. “I knew the bucks were looking for a girlfriend.”

When the arrow pierced the big deer, darkness was encroaching, so Holman could not immediately recognize the true scope of the buck.

“I still didn’t know how magnificently big he was,” Holman said, who lives just south of Brownstown. “As I’m walking to him, he’s growing. I called my wife Lacy and said, ‘I shot a big one.’”

No matter how long they hunt, when they harvest an animal, sucking its life away in exchange for its meat and the sport of it, many hunters show their heart, letting free their mixed conflicted feelings of empathy and joy.

“The emotions started to kick in,” Holman said. “The emotions are getting hysterical. When I put my hands on his rack, I had tears in my eyes and I was whooping and hollering.”

On the other end of the phone line in a grocery store in Salem, Lacy wondered if her husband had been injured.

“She was thinking I fell out of my tree stand,” Holman said.

November is prime Indiana deer season

The state is now in the middle of the Nov. 14-29 firearms deer season. Bow season opened Oct. 1. Right now, rifles, shotguns, handguns and other implements of the hunt are fair game, the busiest period when bucks are in rut, roaming the woods as if they are gigantic singles bars, and those who eat venison stock their freezers.

As the air chills, and brightly colored leaves tenaciously make their last stands gripping trees, the wardrobe of style is camouflage accessorized by orange and the theme of the season is obtaining the deer of the year.

Brownstown’s Jeremy Steinkamp is a deer expert. He designs food plots for his own hunting land, and for customers, and loves watching deer on trail cameras, fattening up on food mixtures, and then hunting them, most of the time with bow and arrow.

It is Steinhamp’s mission to help grow bigger deer and he said that has definitely been happening around Indiana.

“Indiana is a sleeper state,” he said of being a potentially coveted destination for big bucks. “Indiana is starting to become a trophy state.”

Other states, both in the Midwest and elsewhere, are more historically linked to deer hunting, big bucks and volume of bucks. Still, the Hoosier non-hunter might be surprised at the breadth of deer hunting in this state best-known for its basketball and the Indianapolis 500.

During the 2019-20 season, 114,882 deer were taken across the state, antlered bucks, anterless bucks, anterless does, all kinds. The take was 5,000 higher in 2015-16.

A lot, but still shy of other regional states like Michigan, which harvested 376,000 deer in 2017. A running joke is that during firearms deer season in Michigan the state has the second largest army on the continent. Missouri had a harvest count of 290,000 deer in 2018.

To some, the whitetail deer is a nuisance animal, one that may destroy flowers in the backyard. Or more insidiously, require thorough vigilance on the road as they dash across highways in the dark, necessitating automobile drivers to swerve to avoid accidents.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration claims there are 1.5-million deer-vehicle accidents annually causing 150 human deaths and $1.1 billion in property damage. No one counts the number of near-heart attacks provoked as motorists slam on the brakes so they do not become statistics.

A company called Deer Busters in Pennsylvania, which manufactures products for homeowners to protect those flower beds from munching deer, estimates there are around 30 million deer in the United States, saying about 1 million live in Indiana. That’s nearly 1/10th the census count of Americans, so if it seems deer are everywhere that is supporting evidence.

According to one study, hunters spend $15.6 billion annually on trips, equipment, outfitters and the like. That represents big bucks in more than one way. Of the estimated 13.7 million hunters across the country, 79 percent of them pursue deer, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey conducted every five years. Hunting dollars in multi-million-dollar amounts nationwide, help fund conservation programs and fund the Game and Fish departments of individual states.

Scientists believe deer date back four million years as a U.S. presence and it may astonish some that there was a time the seemingly super-abundant whitetail deer of today was considered be threatened by extinction.

By the 1890s, just 300,000 deer were believed to be living within the country’s borders. Originally, the Lacy Act of 1900, which among its provisions made it illegal to sell venison and other wild game meat, began transforming the landscape. Deer management policies adopted over the last third of the 20th century subsequently hastened the growth of the whitetail population.

Filling in the blanks with Fish and Wildlife’s every-half-decade studies are privately undertaken economic impact reviews that sometimes serve as a political reminder hunters and conservationists have much in common.

One study was titled “Hunting in America: An Economic Force for Conservation. “Funded by the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, it found hunting expenditures account for 680,000-plus jobs across the nation.

“Hunting has been an integral part of the American experience since its beginning,” the report stated, “and to millions of people who still practice the rich tradition, it provides a powerful connection to the outdoors, as well as to family and friends who share a passion for the sport. Hunting provides a view to the outdoors like no other activity, requiring enthusiasts to become intimately knowledgeable of the land and game they hunt, as well as how the two interact with each other.”

Deer hunting can often involve ritual and habit, fathers taking sons into the field when they are mere youths, experiences that lead to adulthood while introducing them to blood sports, even as they teach proper etiquette in the woods. Many Native American tribes initiate boys into hunting through religious ceremony and custom.

Hunting veterans, even those of decades, usually remember the circumstances of harvesting their first deer. Many times they were not yet 10 years old and their guide and teacher was their father.

Mark Maxie of Seymour, who accompanied a 7-year-old this year during September’s youth hunt when he bagged a six-point buck as his first deer, said they watched it together ahead of time for some time.

“We’d been sitting for about an hour,” Maxie said. “I remember being that excited about my first deer. I’ve never lost that feeling.”

Chris Fischvogt, now 45, was nine when he killed his first deer. He said he bugged his father to take him into the woods.

“It was the day before Thanksgiving,” Fischvogt said. “I had a borrowed shotgun and was up a tree. He said, ‘Good luck.’ I didn’t know what I was doing. I was nervous. I had never shot anything. I shot three times.”

Fischvogt has progressed in outlook and accuracy since then. He said he currently has eight deer in the Indiana record book, one non-typical scored at 190.

“I have a lot of mounts,” he said. And he donates venison to neighbors and organizations. “I donate a lot of meat.”

Doug Arthur, 51, of Seymour, who obtained his seasonal deer this year in Kentucky with a crossbow, remembers the first time he pursued deer alone.

“I was a little bit nervous,” Arthur said. “I walked into the woods pretty far on a horse trail. There were a number of does. I was moving along really slow. I was about 15 when I got my first buck, a spike.”

Arthur does not feel compelled to take a deer each year, “only if a ripe one comes along. I sit and watch them. I shoot them every year or so. Basically, I get to know them.”

Henry Reynolds of Lexington has hunted deer for about 35 years, since he was 16, and if Arthur brings a casual approach, Reynolds is more scientific. He said he probably has 50 tree stands scattered around farm properties and at this time of year if he is not working, he is hunting,

Reynolds claims seven entries in the Indiana record book, including a 174 7/8 non-typical taken in Scott County. In 1994, Reynolds took a buck with a shotgun that is on Boone and Crockett’s list. He shot it at about 20 yards.

Reynolds had spent considerable time scouting, on foot, with binoculars, in that era prior to trail cams.

“It was all leg work,” he said. “Two of them were really similar. Typical. Symmetrical rack.”

Reynolds preserves photographs of his hunts in scrapbooks, but he does more than just admire the deer pictures He uses the past for reference and research.

Someone who has become an aficionado of using food plots of turnips, corn, soybeans and clover to attract deer and then study them as they eat even while acting with patience as they grow for a few years, Reynolds agrees aon one trend he has observed since he was a teenager — there are definitely more deer around in Indiana.

“Oh yeah, that’s an understatement,” he said.

Holman’s big score

It wasn’t until Lacy arrived at the scene and the sun had almost completely faded that Holman focused his vehicle headlights on the dead deer and really began to comprehend what he had.

“Oh, my gosh, it’s huge,” he said.

Huge, as in 256 pounds dressed.

“We couldn’t get him in the truck,” Holman said.

The year before, Nov. 5 to the day, Holman took down a 10-point buck with his crossbow in the same county. This deer had 22 points, 17 of them scoreable. He had an expert examine it and came up with a score of 197 7/8 inches.

The buck, estimated at five-and-a-half to six years old, made for succulent eating. Some say bigger deer can be tougher to chew, but Holman did not find this to be true.

“He made for a lot of dinners and he tasted just fine,” he said.

The deer head decorates the living room wall.

“Laying on the couch, I sit and stare at him,” Holman said.

The king-sized buck turned into meat and mount and it is not clear which is more satisfying to a still-stunned Cory Holman.