Ray Vitorrio isn’t a big-time deer hunter. Not by a long shot. The Louisiana State Penitentiary colonel freely admits that.
“I’ve only killed two bucks in my life,” Vitorrio told LouisianaSportsman.com yesterday. “I don’t go out in the woods in the summertime like everybody else and look for sign or nothing.”
But the 54-year-old is one of the lucky Angola prison employees granted permission to hunt on the 18,000-acre property. So the first hint of sunlight on Dec. 5 found Vittorio sitting in a stand near a ridge in the beautiful Tunica Hills.
He was huddled in the 28-degree temperatures, with his old Winchester Model 1200 pump shotgun loaded with slugs and ready for action.
Vittorio was ready for a deer, but really he was just out enjoying nature. And he hasn’t shown a lot of discrimination in his hunting, as proven by his bowhunting earlier this season after a two-year hiatus following an accident.
“The first day back hunting, I shot two coons with my bow,” he laughed. “I shot a squirrel with my bow. I shot an armadillo with my bow.
“People joke, ‘You just shoot any damn thing you see.’”
But at 6:30 a.m., a deer appeared in the dissipating gloom of dawn.
“I just caught a glimpse of something sneaking down this ridge,” Vittorio said.
The deer, which the hunter only knew was a buck, reached a spot where Vittorio had felled one of his other two bucks and the shotgun barked.
“The way it jumped, I could tell I hit it,” Vittorio said. “I watched the direction it went.”
When he climbed from the stand, however, worry set in because there wasn’t much blood.
“I thought I had gut shot it,” he said.
Vittorio decided to go back to his house and give the deer time to bleed out – still with no clue how big the buck was.
“It just looked like a good 8-point deer,” he said.
After getting stuck, he realized he had left his cell phone at his house. So he started walking. Another employee happened by, and took him home.
He and son Chad returned to the stand, and began looking for blood.
“We found a few drops here and there, but not much,” the elder Vittorio said. “Basically we went in the direction I saw it run.”
The deer was piled up only about 70 yards away.
“When I got it, I’m, like, ‘Oh my God!’” Vittorio said.
The deer was massive in all respects. The 275-pound body was the first thing to catch his attention – but it didn’t take long for Vittorio to realize he had killed a real brute.
“I really didn’t realize until I walked around to the front and saw all those points,” he said.
Fifteen points were arrayed around a massive frame that encircled 22 ½ inche3s of air. The main beams stretched 25 and 26 inches, and sprouted from 6-inch bases.
“It’s mass all the way out,” Vittorio said.
The deer green scored at 187 ½ inches.
“I’ve seen deer like that on TV, but never thought I’d kill one,” Vittorio said.
He said friends have given him a hard time because of his lackadaisical attitude toward deer hunting.
“I’ve got everybody mad at me because they’ve got all this sophisticated equipment and I go out like an old farm boy and killed this deer,” Vittorio chuckled.
