Hunter Salter bags 'monster buck' on Jan. 8 in Conecuh County, Alabama

Hunter Salter with monster buck nicknamed 'Crazy Horns'

Hunter Salter lived up to his namesake on Friday morning when the 27-year-old hunter from Uriah ended a three-year obsession when he killed a monster buck nicknamed “Crazy Horns.”

Salter killed the large buck Friday around 9 a.m. while hunting alone in a swamp bottom between Nichburg and Belleville in Conecuh County. The 17-point buck had a 19-inch spread with 11 antlers on one side and six on the other. The deer had two drop tines with one measuring 10 inches long and the other measuring nine inches.

Salter and an area taxidermist estimate that the deer, which weighed about 170 pounds, was between eight and 10 years old. Salter said the aged deer had few teeth and was very lean.

Salter, a lifelong hunter who works at Georgia-Pacific at Claiborne, said that his pursuit of this large deer began about three years ago and had become an obsession. Game cameras where he hunts first captured a picture of the deer in 2017, and then several photos of the deer were taken in 2018. In 2019, game cameras where Salter hunts took nearly 2,000 photos of the giant deer.

“I thought about this buck all the time,” Salter said. “I’d even dream about him sometimes. We started calling him ‘Crazy Horns.’ Every off day I had off during hunting season, I’d hit the woods trying to get this one deer. For two years, I didn’t pull the trigger on another deer. I wanted this one.”

On Wednesday of last week, Salter scouted the swamp bottom and saw scrapes and hooked trees. On Friday, he picked out a spot that would give him a good angle on the deer’s approach and sat down in front of a large hardwood tree on a hillside looking down into the bottom. Not long afterwards, he heard two bucks fighting nearby and about five minutes later, a small buck entered the bottom. “Crazy Horns” followed close behind about a minute later.

“The wind was at my back, and he actually entered the bottom from behind me,” Salter said.

Once the buck got about 20 yards in front of Salter, he fired once at the deer, dropping it on the spot with one shot from his Savage 6.5mm Creedmoor rifle. He noted that the rifle was topped with an Athlon Talos scope. The temperature was around 38 degrees and the wind was blowing around 10 miles per hour, he said.

After killing the deer, Salter just sat there for a few minutes, catching his breath as he came to realize that his three-year quest to killed the giant deer had come to an end. He then hiked the half a mile back to his truck and called relatives to let them know he’d bagged the big buck. His grandfather Butch Salter, father Johnny Salter and family friend Demetrius Thomas arrived a short time later to help him drag the deer out of the woods.

Salter, who plans to have the deer mounted, also noted that his wife, Mary Kathrine, had been very supportive of his efforts to killed “Crazy Horns.”

“When I got home, I told her, ‘Well, it’s over. We can do whatever you want to do, go on a vacation, whatever you want.”

Salter said that he jokingly told her that he planned to have the deer stuffed in a full body mount.

“As a joke, I told her that I planned to have the whole deer body-mounted, so I could take it around and show everybody,” he said with a laugh. “She wasn’t very high on that idea.”

Salter does plan to reach out to the Alabama Whitetail Records Museum in Thomaston to see how his deer stacks up against some of the biggest deer ever killed in Alabama. At press time, Salter’s deer had not been officially scored.