One such reminder came in Scott County, on the northern Cumberland Plateau region of the state, recently, when an angler happened across a deer that would've been a trophy for just about any hunter.
Gerry Garrett (no relation to the author) and David Hill were fishing in a remote area of New River — one of the two main tributaries of the Big South Fork River — on September 30 when they first noticed a smell of something rotten, then noticed a deer, then noticed a big rack.
The deer was in the water, and had been dead for several days. Although there is no way to know for sure — the carcass was too far decayed for a tissue sample to be tested — it's almost a surety that the deer died from EHD.
The large whitetail was a 12-point buck with a near-perfect rack. Needless to say, fishing was forgotten when the men — both of them avid deer hunters — discovered the large buck in the water.
"We pulled it out of the river, but we didn't have anyway to remove the head," Garrett, a police officer in the town of Oneida, said.
A few days later, Garrett and a friend who works at a deer processing business in Scott County made the hike back into the New River gorge to retrieve the animal.
"It was a grueling hike down there," Garrett said. "I knew it would stink more than it did the day I found it, so I knew, or was hoping, that Jason would be able to withstand the smell."
After cleaning up the deer's skull plate and removing dead tissue from it, Garrett obtained a permit from TWRA Wildlife Officer Shannon Young in order to take the rack to a taxidermist.
Although it has not yet been officially scored, several people who have examined the rack believe it will score anywhere from the mid-140s to around 150. Regardless, it is one of the biggest (perhaps the singular biggest, but there is no way to know) deer discovered dead by EHD this year.
Had the deer been killed by an archery hunter, it would've easily been big enough to make the Pope & Young record book, which requires a minimum score of 125 for archery-taken typical whitetail. The deer would've also been big enough to make the Tennessee record book, the Tennessee Deer Registry, regardless of weapon used to kill it. Tennessee requires a minimum of 115 for archery-taken deer and 140 for gun-taken deer.
In fact, the deer would've been one of the 10 largest bucks in the Tennessee Deer Registry for Scott County, where it was found. It would likely have surpassed Oneida resident Jared Terry's 1994 140-6/8 buck as the ninth largest on record in Scott County and second-largest buck taken with a bow there.
Garrett, who said he saw a deer similar in size in the 2005 gun season but was unable to get off a shot, said he plans to have the deer mounted European-style and enter it in Scott County's Big Bucks program, after which it will go in his basement.
"There isn't as much value for finding it as there would have been had I killed it," he said.
And if the deer had happened by his stand during a hunt?
"I would hope I was up all night the night before and didn't have enough energy to get excited, because if I wasn't I would say I would not be able to get a calm, relaxed shot on it," he said.
Such a find confirms hunters' worst fears: That the big bucks they've carefully passed over in years past might fall victim to EHD before this year's deer season even arrives. The good news for hunters is that the number of EHD deaths are quickly diminishing, and the disease should soon have run its course. Still, that doesn't help the deer that have already succumbed to illness.
"It is sad that a deer this big was killed by a bug bite and wasn't able to be harvested by a hunter," Garrett said. "Especially me!"
