When this outstanding Kansas 9-pointer came in to the author’s carefully constructed decoy setup, it was show time, and the author got the surprise of his life. He also got the buck!

Looking over my right shoulder, I was impatiently watching an immature 8-pointer exit the scene and waiting for him to get far enough away from my setup so I could do some more rattling and calling. The poor youngster had stuck around my stand area for over 20 minutes. He was trying to determine just what was up with the newcomer -- my decoy, “Deek Boy.” The buck was reluctant to leave, and I was running out of daylight as the sun was lazily beginning to dip below the tree line.

The buck was just going out of sight when I slowly turned and reached for my antlers to give what would probably be my last calling sequence of the day. At that same instant, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. There, just to my left along the woods edge, I saw a puffed-up buck with his ears pinned back, homing in on the decoy. I instantly recognized him as a shooter, and while scrambling to trade the antlers for my bow, an incredible spectacle began.

This mature buck had snuck in on my position while I was watching “junior” leave. He obviously had heard the initial rattling and calling that I’d been doing. Now, with the decoy firmly in his sights, he no doubt was bent on letting the unknown intruder know that he wasn’t welcome.

Without warning -- and in what seemed like milliseconds -- the disturbed buck charged in and attacked the decoy in the most brutal and most frightening display of aggression, power and dominance I have ever seen. Deek Boy lay in tatters as I subconsciously drew my bow. After the attack, the buck charged into the woods and nearly knocked himself out on a heavy limb. Then he stopped almost right below me, turned around, and looked back at his fallen enemy with a “What the heck just happened?” blank stare in his eyes. I centered the peep on his kill zone at eight yards and touched the release.

After the arrow hit him, he took off through the Kansas woods, and shortly thereafter all fell silent. From when I first saw the buck to when I put an arrow in him, not more than seven seconds had elapsed. To this day, I still don’t remember drawing my bow; it all happened that fast! In my entire hunting career, never have I witnessed anything as intense as this encounter -- on TV or otherwise.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Earlier that morning, I had placed the decoy in the pasture in a heavy November fog only a short distance from where I’d set him up the evening before. I had accidentally slept in that morning, as the unseasonably warm weather had zapped some of the zeal out of me that normally accompanies an early November archery hunt in the Midwest.

The big bucks just weren’t doing their thing, due to the warm daytime temperatures. When I woke up earlier that morning, it was cool, and a heavy, damp fog filled the air. I mentally kicked myself for sleeping in, but got set up by about 9:30 a.m.

The fog finally lifted around 10:45, and it didn’t take long for deer to come out of the woodwork. At 11:15 this same buck came out of the woods across the pasture with two does. I rattled, grunted and snort-wheezed, and although I got his attention, unbeknownst to me at the time he couldn’t see the decoy. He was a couple of hundred yards away, and Deek Boy was in a small dip.

The wind was out of the west, so I was set up on the edge of a finger of timber that stretched roughly from the north to south linking two larger sections of timber. I had made two mock scrapes along the finger’s edge to my right and left. My intent was to try to dupe any buck that might circle downwind of the setup into thinking that a new intruder buck had slipped into the area. Later on that evening my strategy really paid off!

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