CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Most bow hunters go into the archery season in West Virginia with a pretty good sense of the deer in their hunting area. Usually a trail camera has revealed a series of bucks the acreage is hosting for the year and typically hunters will pick out one in particular they are looking to take. Then the focus is solely on that particular deer.
That’s the direct opposite of B.T. Roberts’ 2025 buck.
“This buck showed up on December 2nd. I get a picture of him walking away and I knew immediately this was a deer I wanted to go after,” Roberts said on West Virginia Outdoors.
Roberts changed up his whole hunting plan on his lease in Boone County and repositioned his stand in an area close to some food plots he cultivated on the property.
“When he showed up, I changed my whole hunting area and focused on that particular spot,” he said.
Roberts hadn’t previously seen the buck and suddenly was getting picture after picture of him and some of them were in daylight. One particular picture he feared would haunt him. The alert on his phone dinged and he was in Lexington, Kentucky headed to Louisville with his wife her parents to see the Lights Under Louisville Christmas Display. It was a trip Roberts forget he promised his wife he would take.
“I said I didn’t agree to this trip and she said I did and it would be fine, I said I would have never agreed to this,” he laughed.
He couldn’t help but think if he weren’t in Kentucky, he would have been in the stand at 9:13 a.m. on December 20th, the exact moment his cell camera on the stand captured the buck only yards away from what would have been his shooting position.
“Oh man, I was some kind of upset. I was thinking, what have you done to me?,” he laughed.
When he returned from the Kentucky trip, he tried to surmise how many days he could get off work without getting fired to dedicated what time was left in the 2025 archery season to the big buck He found himself in the stand a day later in terrible weather with rainfall and everything in the woods wet and muted when the action started.
“Out of nowhere I can hear what sounds like some deer trotting toward me, but I couldn’t see anything,” he explained.
Eventually through the early morning light B.T. was able to discern two does making their way toward his stand. Then a third appeared as the first two disappeared over the hill and in the distant mist there seemed to be another deer.
“I’m like, ‘Holy Smokes that can’t be him.’ But the closer he got the bigger he got and I said, ‘That’s him.'” explained Roberts.
Suddenly Roberts found himself in a tough spot. He had deer right on top of him, but he was sitting down and didn’t even have his bow in his hand. He was afraid to move to get his bow, let alone standup. But fate smiled on him as the doe feeding 15 yards away, started to move toward the big buck who had parked himself behind a giant red oak tree 25 yards away.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Lord please, let this buck stay here long enough for me to get a shot opportunity,” he explained.
Listen to “B.T. Roberts — Boone County buck” on Spreaker.
The Lord obliged. With bow finally in hand, the buck left the oak tree and came straight toward Roberts.
“He did a little j-hook and gave me a quartering away shot at 12 yards on the buck of a lifetime,” he said.
B.T let the arrow fly and it hit the mark. The giant beast took off, but didn’t go all that far and Roberts heard him crash less than 100 yards away. Still shaking Roberts got on the phone and made calls to everybody he knew, starting with his dad who was well aware of the buck Roberts was after.
Roberts eventually left the tree after a period of time passed. Instead of going to where he heard the deer, he started from the point of the shot, found his arrow, and tracked the blood trail over the hill near a laurel thicket. When Roberts spotted the deer, he was speechless.
“When I got to him, the deer grew. There was no ‘ground shrinkage’ and the trail camera didn’t do it justice. It the kind of deer every hunter dreams of,” he added.
Since killing the deer Roberts checked through his pictures an found he had a picture of the buck in 2021. Hunters on a neighboring lease had pictures of the buck every years cine 2020. He even had some guys who had pictures of him several miles away.
Remember that trip to Lexington and Louisville with his wife and her parents? Roberts was convinced taking that trip made a difference.
“After it was all said and done, I think the Lord blessed me with that deer because I did put my family first that day,” he said.