Kyle Sickelsteel from Howard City had a terrific firearms deer season in Michigan. He bagged three adult bucks in Montcalm County with two bullets out of his 6.5 Creedmore and two of the whitetails were of trophy proportions.
The pair of bucks he got with one bullet on Thanksgiving morning had their antlers locked. The largest of those deer had nontypical 12-point antlers with a drop tine. That’s the one he shot. The smaller 7-pointer that the 12 locked antlers with was already dead. Sickelsteel guessed that the bigger buck broke the 7’s neck and had been trying to dislodge himself from the carcass for days.
Although scoring on the locked bucks was the highlight of Kyle’s almost 20 years of deer hunting, his 2024 season got off to a terrific start, too. On the morning of November 15, Sickelsteel bagged one of his best bucks up until that time, a trophy 14-pointer. He shot it from the same blind that he got the locked bucks from. The 12-point he got on Thanksgiving had larger antlers than his opening-day buck.
The pair of bucks Kyle Sickelsteel got with one bullet on Thanksgiving morning had their antlers locked. The largest of those deer had nontypical 12-point antlers with a drop tine. That’s the one he shot. The smaller 7-pointer that the 12 locked antlers with was already dead.
“Shooting the 12-point was kind of a mercy thing, in my opinion,” Kyle commented. “I was by myself, and I wasn’t going to try to wrangle those deer to separate them. Figured I would get hurt.”
At the time Sickelsteel shot the 12, he wasn’t sure the second buck was dead. They were about 160 yards away when he took the shot. If Kyle had not killed the buck that was still alive, it certainly would have died a slow death. Due to stress from the ordeal, the buck that was still alive might not have survived even if it was freed from the 7-point.
The 12-point had been unable to eat anything during the days it was tangled with the dead buck, but it was able to drink water. Kyle said the whitetail’s stomach was filled with water.
“I have a mile walk to the swamp where I hunt on private property,” Kyle explained. “I hunt from an old blind near a pond that has been there forever that my great grandfather hunted from. The blind is on a hill that is about 15 feet higher than the surrounding terrain. There’s a lot of tall canary grass and autumn olive brush in the area.
“I got in the blind before daylight on Thanksgiving morning and the deer were acting strange. I could hear them snorting out in the canary grass before daylight. I didn’t think they were blowing at me. I thought they were alarmed by something else.
“After it got light enough to see, there was a doe 20 feet from the blind in the canary grass, and she started acting weird. Even though the wind was in my favor, she snorts and runs out in the grass. Then I saw another deer 160 yards away with its head down. I thought it was a doe at first, but then it lifted its head, and I saw a lot of white from antlers.”
Kyle’s first thought was that the buck’s rack was stuck in the grass. After looking at the deer with binoculars, however, he was eventually able to determine the buck was attached to another whitetail. When the standing deer moved to an opening in the brush, Sickelsteel dropped the deer with a 143-grain bullet from his rifle at 8:30 a.m.
He estimated the 7-pointer was 3 ½ years old and the 12-point was 4 or 5 years old.
Kyle and his friends were unable to separate the racks. The fact that they were unable to separate the bucks after they were dead confirms that it would have been impossible to do so when the 12-pointer was still alive.
Sickelsteel suspects the bucks hit their antlers together so hard that they temporarily spread enough to allow them to become entangled when they sprang back to their normal positions. He plans on having a European mount done of the locked bucks.
It was 10:30 a.m. when Kyle shot the 14-pointer on November 15.
“There was a lot of action that morning,” Sickelsteel said. “I watched that big buck for a while before I was able to get a shot. He was chasing a doe that must have been in heat.”
After watching the buck chase the doe in and out of the brush a number of times, Kyle eventually got an opportunity for a shot when the whitetail was on the edge of the pond and dropped it in its tracks. He guessed that the 14-point was 4 ½ years old. Its antlers had an 18 ½-inch spread.
The antlers had not been measured, but it looks like they would gross score around 140. The minimum for entry of typical gun kills in state records maintained by Commemorative Bucks of Michigan is 125.
