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Deer of the Day Non-Typical Trophy Bucks

Shane Frost Buck: 216-Inch Non-Typical Trophy

by Clay Newcomb   |  April 22nd, 2013 0


Twenty-eight feet high in a lock-on stand sat a lone bowhunter, as still as a stone, with nervous palms grasping his weapon. Seven yards beyond the perched hunter, a 28-point, drop-tined swamp monster with antlers as massive as a cluster of young cypress knots, swaggered in behind a group of does. Without warning, the buck stopped and snapped his glare directly into the hunter’s leaf-barren tree. With squinted eyes, Shane Frost, of Paragould, Arkansas, in a motionless reflex, prayed a silent prayer that the monarch wouldn’t bust him. Within seconds, fate would choose its path.


“I could have let an arrow fly,” Frost said, “but I just wasn’t going to take a marginal shot at a buck like this.”

Shane would not see the buck again until November 2011.




Hunting the huge river bottoms is difficult because there aren’t many topographical features to funnel deer into predictable travel patterns. In mountainous or hilly country, terrain features make deer movement predictable. In flat land, deer travel is nearly impossible to predict.

In Arkansas, it is legal to hunt over bait, and in situations like this, it’s a extremely helpful if you want to be consistently successful. Hunting for a mature buck over supplemental feed is much more difficult than many people think. Deer quickly become extremely skittish, and mature bucks rarely visit these areas in the daytime.

Fall 2011


“At least the buck was still alive,” Frost said, “but, after that, everybody knew about the buck.”

Word spread quickly that a giant non-typical was roaming the Black River bottoms and, according to Frost, “in the fall of 2011, the deer started to get pressured from all around the property.”

The summer and fall ranges of the buck spread through several different properties, and numerous hunters had pictures of the giant. The buck summered about one mile away from the 1,700-acre property that Frost hunts and hadn’t shown up on his hunting ground until early December the previous year.

Through the late summer and early fall, he checked his cameras often, hoping to get a clue about the monarch’s return, but nothing surfaced. Then, one day in early November during the Arkansas Youth Season, an amazing find surfaced at the camp. Eight-year-old Cooper Lutz and his father were walking through the timber towards their stand when Cooper spotted a huge, broken antler. Upon inspection, Frost and several others from camp thought it might be the big non-typical. However, no one had a single picture of the buck in the fall of 2011, so they didn’t know what his new rack looked like! They could only guess that it was his antler.


“The buck was getting pressured so hard in early 2011 that I think he had become extremely skittish and wouldn’t come near feeders or cameras,” Frost said. No body was getting pictures of the deer, but he must have been there all November. He had just gone totally under the radar.

With eager anticipation, Frost hoped the buck would show up on a camera. Every late-season hunter knows a buck’s pattern changes dramatically once the rut is over and he starts to focus on recovering from the stressful rut. Biologically, the buck would have to gravitate back towards a consistent feeding pattern, and Frost just hoped the buck would be stay on the property.

Thirty-one long days clicked by in December and the buck was still a no-show. Neither hide nor horn of the buck was seen as the days shortened and winter set in. It wouldn’t be until early January that the spectacular images of the broken-beamed non-typical illuminated Frost’s computer screen as he checked his cameras. As soon as he arrived, the hunt was on.




Around January 20, the buck disappeared from the original spot Frost was hunting. Following his instinct, he had a strong suspicion that the buck was feeding in the area where he had placed the second camera. He hadn’t checked it in 10 days, but on January 25 the wind was perfect and he decided to hunt the stand for the first time.

“I got into the stand around 3 p.m. and about 30 minutes later, I saw two young bucks stand up in the brush, 75 yards away,” Frost recalled. As the bucks came to 40 yards, he noticed they were becoming very skittish, and he saw a group of does coming towards the stand. Trailing behind the does, coming up out of slough, was the huge non-typical! Frost’s gut feeling was right!



The 100-grain Shuttle T-Lock broadhead struck the giant high and slightly back. The beast bolted and Frost watched as the buck crossed a small slough. He knew the hit was lethal, but he was convinced it wasn’t the best shot. He was certain he hit liver and a least one lung. In most situations this wouldn’t be reason for concern, but in this swamp country blood trailing a deer can be difficult. After finding his arrow, he backed out until the next day.

Unfortunately, Frost’s daughter was scheduled to have sinus surgery early the next morning. Being the family man that he is, he and several friends didn’t make it back to the woods until 2 p.m. the next day.

“The dried blood was difficult to follow after he crossed the slough,” Frost recalled. The group trailed the buck into the night, searching with flashlights, but couldn’t find a strong blood trail on the other side of the water. Things then got worse when a strong rain blew in over night—literally a blood trailer’s worst nightmare. Frost knew the blood trail would be gone and their efforts would be spent walking and looking for the buck.



Regardless, the buck’s Boone and Crockett score is phenomenal, and in reality, this is the largest non-typical buck ever taken with a bow in Arkansas. The keys to this hunt were persistence, smart hunting and not pressuring the buck too much. Combine this with a last minute “home-run swing” to switch stands and get closer to the buck’s bedding area and you have an extraordinary hunt. That being said, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving, persistent and hard-hunting Natural State bowhunter.

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