Potential State Record Muzzleloader Buck taken in New Hampshire

_{Breaking News Bucks is presented by ARCUS hunting brands. To find out more click here.}

After a long work week, Jantzen Clifton planned to skip the 2023 opener for muzzleloader in New Hampshire. He had stayed up watching a movie the night before and was enjoying his Saturday morning coffee when the phone rang. It was friend, Nate Johnson, and he asked: “Are you seriously not going gunning?”

Jantzen had killed two deer with his bow earlier, and he just wasn’t feeling it. So, he replied, “No, you guys go have fun!”

A long pause followed. Then Jantzen decided that he should go, but he wasn’t quite ready to leave. So, he told Nate he would meet up with the group of friends at a local store. Once there, they decided to push a small area nearby, which Jantzen had hunted twice before.

“It is not my favorite spot, because it gets hunted hard,” he says.

However, it would be a quick drive, and everyone was anxious to get in the woods. So he went along. The group of four split into two pushers and two watchers. Jantzen sat in a spot where an “old timer” had told him: “If you ever push this place, sit right there!” He wasn’t expecting much action, and certainly wasn’t expecting what was about to happen.

The drivers were only a few hundred yards away when they started the push. After just a few minutes, Jantzen could see them coming through the brush. Then he caught some movement to his left; a giant buck was running right at him!

There was no time to get nervous; Jantzen shouldered his .50 caliber Optima just as the buck spotted him and stopped. Smoke filled the air when he touched the trigger, obscuring the buck as it bolted back into cover. Jantzen then tried to process everything that just happened.

“I was in shock,” Jantzen remembers. “I knew what I had seen, but I couldn’t believe it!”

---

When the pushers reached him, they took one look at his face and thought he had missed. But Jantzen called out: “I either just killed or wounded the biggest buck I have ever seen!” Then his friend looked down and said, “I’ve got blood everywhere! You got him; you got him!” The short, red trail led to the monster buck just few yards away.

The incredible deer has heavy mass and double drop tines.

After some celebration, Jantzen took the buck to his butcher. Shortly afterward, he received a call. The buck had a previous wound; the scar was in the same place where Jantzen had hit the only other big buck he had ever shot two years prior. But that buck got away. That hunt was about two miles from where he killed the double-drop buck.

“There is a pretty good chance this is the same deer,” Jantzen claims. “Because big ones around here are not that common!”

The buck will no doubt land high in the New Hampshire record books. If the green score of 188 4/8 holds up, Jantzen’s buck could eclipse the state’s current muzzleloader record. According to the New Hampshire Antler & Skull Trophy Club, the current muzzleloader state record non-typical scores 182 5/8 and was taken by Glenn Cummings in 1998.

Had Jantzen just skipped the hunt, this story wouldn’t have happened!