Byron Ellington holds the mount of his buck, the largest typical rack taken in North Carolina last season, with a score of 152 7/8. It is in the top 15 all-time typicals taken by bow in North Carolina. Photo by Dan Kibler.

Byron Ellington and Jerrold Wade didn't have to wait very long last year for their deer seasons to be successful.

According to the calendar, Wade didn't wait at all. Ellington waited a month, but once he got started, he filled a tag very quickly.

Neither of the two hunters had to spend much time in the woods before they were dragging out two of the biggest bucks taken during North Carolina's 2006 archery season.

Wade, an aircraft mechanic from Arcadia in Davidson County, took his Stokes County trophy on Sept. 9, the opening day of archery season.

Ellington, a farmer from Reidsville, took his Rockingham County buck on Oct. 14 -- but on only his second hunt of the season.

Ellington's giant 8-pointer was the biggest typical whitetail taken in North Carolina last season by a bowhunter, winning the archery category at the Dixie Deer Classic's big-buck contest this past March. With a 20-inch inside spread and tines as long as 11 inches, it scored 152 7/8 points (Boone and Crockett Club system) to rank among the top 15 all-time in the state.

And all because a friend who was shooting groundhogs happened to catch a glimpse of the big deer a few weeks earlier.

Ellington and his father farm tobacco in Rockingham County, but the land where the trophy buck lived was planted almost entirely in grains: soybeans, wheat and corn. The buck was working a narrow spot in the back of one bean field in what Ellington described as a textbook spot for a big buck.

"A friend of mine from church, Paul Braxton, he'd taken his grandson up there to the farm to shoot groundhogs. He called my father and told him he had something entertaining to tell me," Ellington said. "I called him back, and he said that he'd seen five bucks in that soybean field, including two 'monsters' -- an 8-(pointer) and a 10-(pointer). I was working tobacco, and I was behind; once we got caught up, I went up there."

The field was on a farm that Ellington's family had once leased for several years to another hunter. However, that lease ran out, and nobody had hunted there in at least two years.

"They'd had two years without any pressure on them," said Ellington, who along with his father also runs a bird-hunting preserve -- Ellington Farms' Quail Hollow Hunting Preserve.

"The bean field was a narrow little channel near the back of a field, about 75 yards wide. It had white oaks on one side that were dropping acorns, and there was a pine thicket on one side and a cutover, and there was a creek bottom pretty close by," he said. "It was a good area for bedding, staging and feeding."

Ellington had made only one trip into the woods before he escaped the rigors of farming late in the afternoon on Saturday, Oct. 14.

So late, that he almost decided not to go.

"I had found a tree in the white oaks where the acorns were dropping, and it was getting late when I got there -- in fact, I thought it was too late; I started not to go, but I went anyway," he said. "I carried a Summit Goliath climbing stand in, and I didn't get situated until about 5:30. I had a small buck and six does come out in the field and get within 20 yards of me, and then I caught a glimpse of him coming into the field, coming out of the pine thicket on the other side.

"He had his head down, eating beans, but I knew he was a big-bodied deer, and I could see that he had good G-2s and G-3s (major tines), but he never picked his head up out of the beans the whole time."

The buck fed leisurely across the field in the general direction of Ellington, who was well up in a poplar tree, about 10 yards back in the woods from the edge of the field. The buck fed toward him, stopping about 40 yards out, then he angled slightly toward Ellington, coming to a stop 25 yards away to do some more serious grazing in the beans.

"I had wanted to find a tree right on the edge of the field so I could shoot straight down the edge, but these two poplars right next to each other were the only ones that would work," he said. "They were about 20 or 30 feet back off the field.

"There was a gum tree off to the side, and one of its limbs was right in front of me. I figured it would give me some breakup, some cover," he said. "I thought it would be out of the way if I got a real close shot like I expected to. I don't take any 35- or 40-yard shots, because I don't shoot enough at those distances to be comfortable. I figured I'd get a 15-, 20- or 25-yard shot, and the limb would be out of the way. But when he checked up at about 27 yards and I drew back to shoot, that one limb was dead in the way."