The buck continued following the doe toward the road, broke out of the wood lot, and meandered through Crawford's yard in front of his house and onto another neighbor's property. Suddenly at 4:40 p.m., Crawford looked to his left back toward his house and watched the doe streak across his back yard with the buck in hot pursuit. "I put the scope on him and swung through to his shoulder and pulled the trigger when I got on him," Crawford said.

By the time Crawford was ready to trail his buck, a crowd of seven friends has assembled at his house to help. He stepped into the edge of the woods where the buck had sped by an hour before. A couple of his friends picked up the blood trail, too. Confident of the shot, Crawford stood back to watch his friends follow the blood trail . . . backwards. He stood there in the dark with a smile on his face and kept quiet, savoring the moment. When they came to the end of the blood trail, Crawford finally told them that their blood sign ran out because that was the spot where he shot the deer. They all had a laugh and were turned around in the right direction. The tracking job didn't last long since the buck had only gone 40 yards into the thick brush.

The .270 Winchester Short Magnum did its job, with the bullet entering the point of the onside shoulder and exiting behind the off shoulder. Upon later examination, Crawford learned that his shot the opening day of bow season wasn't that far off the mark. Apparently, the buck's onside shoulder was far forward at the shot, with the broadhead entering the front of the shoulder and exiting behind the offside shoulder, but missing the vitals in the process.

The Crawford buck is a contender for the Tennessee Deer Registry, with its 17 scorable points grossing 175 1/8 points on the Boone and Crockett scale. It is a basic 10-point typical, with five non-typical points on the left antler and one on the right. According to preliminary measurements, the buck will net score approximately 170 points as a non-typical. Four additional non-typical points barely miss the 1-inch minimum for scoring purposes, and account for the buck's earliest fame in the Tennessean newspaper as a 21-pointer.

Crawford said finally killing the buck had its downside, too. "A reporter did a story about the deer in the Tennessean and made a mistake when he wrote that I killed it at night," Crawford recalled. "I was duck hunting in Arkansas when I heard about it, so I called him and I straightened him out. Then people got on the Internet and started saying all kinds of crazy things about me. He printed a retraction, but the damage was done."