nc velvet bcuk fall

Last October 19, Brad Duke fell 20 feet when a strap on the top section of his tree stand ladder steps broke. Brad lay unconscious for 2½ hours, then stumbled to his truck and drove home. His wife drove him to the hospital, where x-rays revealed he had a cracked vertebrae and 3 broken ribs.

Doctors told Brad surgery was a possibility, but he’d have none of that. He signed himself out of the emergency room 45 minutes later and went home, spent 3 weeks in bed and “then got in the gym and started lifting weights.”

Fully healed, Brad was back in a tree stand in Granville County on Saturday, September 13. As fate would have it, the same big buck he had been hunting a year earlier when he fell showed up. “I had tons of history and pictures of this deer since he was a young up-and-comer,” Brad said.

Brad’s shot was on target, clipping the 9-pointer’s heart, and the deer didn’t go far. The rack rough-scored 161” in velvet. Read the full story at North Carolina Sportsman.