After executing a very difficult shot on Dec. 30, and after spending a restless night waiting for dawn to arrive on the last day of 2004, a much-relieved Gene Wensel poses with "the buck of a 50 or 100 lifetimes!" Photo courtesy of Gene Wensel.

For some people, hunting deer is a hobby. For others, the activity is closer to a passion. When you do something all your life with intense eagerness, it becomes more than simply what you do. It becomes who you are.

My brother Barry and I have been passionately hunting deer since we were youngsters. We were blessed with a father who loved to hunt and allowed us the freedom to pursue our interests from a very early age. We had bows and arrows from childhood and, as many friends have noted, simply never put our toys away.

Starting out with traditional equipment, we never got caught up in the compound bow craze that hit in the '70s. Like fishermen who choose to place self-imposed limitations upon themselves by using only fly rods, hand-tied flies and light tippets while practicing selectivity in what they take home, we have for many years now been using simple bows and arrows to hunt mature whitetail bucks. It is, has been, and always will be what we do and who we are.

We lived in Montana with our families for almost 30 years. In 1999, after experiencing too many severe winterkills and frequent major die-offs from viral EHD, we decided to pull up stakes and move east. Iowa, Illinois and Kansas have great genetics, no winterkill and minimal gun hunting during the month of November. The Midwest is one big food plot. We settled in rural Iowa primarily because of whitetails.

I chose not to take a buck my first three years as a resident. Then, on a crisp Nov. 6, 2003, I tagged a 166-inch 5x5 at high noon. He was simply too good a buck to pass up.

Two months previously, on Sept. 15, 2003, I got up early to do some scouting. Shortly after dawn, I spotted two great bucks in the back corner of a soybean field. One of them was outstanding. He sported a big drop tine on his right antler and a shorter one on his left. I judged him to be a 200-inch deer. The next morning, Barry and I took positions between the bean field and bedding area. I had our video camera. Twenty minutes after daylight, nothing yet had come through. With binoculars, I could see my brother waving me up the hill. I wasn't really quite ready to move but thought maybe he could see something that I couldn't. I took a couple of steps toward Barry when the big drop-tined buck broke from tall weeds just in front of me. By the time my camera kicked into gear, all I recorded was a few seconds of running footage.

A BUCK FOR THE AGES
The great buck made himself scarce for the remainder of the 2003 season. I never saw him again. Barry saw him twice more, as did several friends who were bowhunting the same area. Barry almost had a shot at him during the late season. Barry slipped into a December tree stand, only to discover he had left his safety belt in the truck. With heavy ice on the stand, he made a quick ground blind 40 yards away. An hour later, the giant buck walked right under the stand while Barry watched from just out of range.

We searched hard for his sheds the following spring but found neither side. He had vanished. Nor did he show himself during summer and early fall scouting.

The 2004 Iowa bow season opened on Oct. 1. On Oct. 17, Barry was sitting in a stand near where we first saw the buck in 2003. I was a mile away. When I met my brother after dark, I could instantly detect excitement. Before dark, the double-drop-tined buck stepped out from across a CRP field. Barry took eight minutes of long-range grainy video footage before low light made him shut the camera down. We reviewed the footage with several friends who knew what they were looking at. The drop tines were long on both sides now, and he appeared to be almost 30 inches wide outside. I was so excited I even sent a picture via e-mail to Gordon Whittington at North American Whitetail.

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