At 73, hunter finally gets whitetail buck
OKLAHOMA CITY—Perseverance pays off. It’s hard to imagine a deer hunter with more patience than Jim Moore of Oklahoma City. At age 73, Moore finally bagged his first whitetail buck after 50 years of hunting in Oklahoma.
“I never really had a good place to hunt,” said Moore, in what may be the biggest understatement in history.
Moore has killed mule deer, elk and a black bear on annual hunting trips to Colorado, but Oklahoma’s whitetail buck had eluded him for a half-century.
Moore didn’t hunt every deer season in those 50 years, but did go hunting during most of them.
He hunted in nine different counties and says he never spotted that many bucks.
“I only pulled the trigger on two deer (before last season),” he said. “It’s kind of a hard luck story. I began to think they were invisible.”
He wouldn’t shoot young bucks or does because “that’s seed for my buck.”
On the last weekend of the 2010 deer gun season, Moore finally got his wall hanger, shooting a 9-point buck on his brother-in-law’s land northeast of Shawnee.
Moore said he never became discouraged all those years of deer hunting in Oklahoma without bagging a buck.
“I love to hunt,” said Moore, who likes to go camping in his 5th wheel. “It’s my favorite sport. I just enjoy the outing. I like to be outside.”
And Moore has a message to other hard luck hunters: “Don’t give up.”