Permission to Hunt New Missouri Property Yields Spectacular Buck

Missouri resident Ian Cassidy grew up in the southern part of the state where he says it was not uncommon to go an entire season just to see a few deer. Additionally,  a "big deer" was around 130 inches. 

After he and his dad lost their private piece they’d hunted for years, the two were forced onto public land.

All that changed when Ian moved to the northern part of the state, where through a friend he found a small piece of private land that he and his wife were given permission to hunt. The season had already been in when he was given the green light, but he was anxious to get some cameras out and stands hung.

"My wife actually took her best and first archery buck off the newly acquired property," Ian said. "So I knew we'd landed on a good piece of land."

On September 26th, Ian got his first picture of a buck. It was followed up the next night with another.

“I really couldn’t tell how big he was because one picture was blurry," he said. "I just assumed it was a nice 6x6 typical."

Those two pictures in late-September is all Ian would get of the buck, as he just seemed to up and vanish.

But on the night of November 3rd, the buck was back on his camera.

"I had two stands set up on the small property for different winds," Ian said. "On Tuesday after work I went in on a quick evening hunt, but didn’t have any luck."

Ian went back in and sat dark-to-dark without the buck showing on Wednesday, and Thursday was a carbon copy of the previous day for the bowhunter.

Prepared to go for a third all-day sit in a row, Ian decided to try his other stand on Friday. He arrived a bit earlier than normal because it was so calm out with very little wind to cover him up.

Waiting for the sun to rise, Ian heard a buck approach, though it was too dark for the him to identify it. He watched a silhouetted outline of a buck working a scrape within range of his stand, unable to tell the size of the buck that soon escaped into the brush.

It was around 7:05 that morning when he looked over to his left and saw deer legs behind a cedar tree at around 80 yards. One look at its rack and Ian confirmed it was the buck he’d been getting on his trail camera. He remembered one piece of advice his dad had given him years ago.

“If that’s the buck you are going to shoot, don’t look at its rack anymore,” Ian recalled.

He took that advice and barred down. As the buck approached, it looked as if he was going to walk within easy range of Ian, but the giant buck veered off course and skirted by the bowhunter through thick brush with no shot present. Ian was forced to watch the buck walk around him at a distance of 30 yards.

"I gave a few grunts to him but he didn’t seem interested in it and simply walked off away from me," he said.

With the buck now over 150 yards from Ian’s stand, the bowhunter picked up his rattling antlers in an attempt to bring him back in. At first it didn’t seem to work, so he sat down to take a break and calm down. After texting a friend to tell him of the encounter with the giant, it wasn’t long that the buck was on his way back in.

"When I saw him walking back toward me, I nearly droppped my phone trying to put it away," Ian explained. 

With the buck coming back on the same trail he originally came in on, this time he made a right turn and walked through Ian’s first shooting lane.

"I tried stopping him at 35 yards, but he didn't hear me," the bowhunter explained. "He kept walking into my second lane — it was probably around 40 yards and again I mouth grunted at him but he didn’t stop."  

As the buck came into Ian’s last shooting lane — one that presented the longest shot of the three — he finally stopped. While the shot was longm, Ian capitalized on his opportunity.

"I wasn’t sure on the hit," he said. "So, I exited quietly and came back later with a friend."

After a slow and deliberate tracking job, the two were easily able to locate Ian’s buck. Carrying 23 points, the northern Missouri buck grossed 232 2/8 inches.