A Monster Missouri Buck

I get the Outdoor Life Magazine via my email and in it was a picture and a story behind a monster buck that was taken in Missouri back on November 4 during archery season. The lucky hunter was, Bill Pulse, getting an incredible 23-point buck.

As the story goes, Bill is a father of 3 boys (ages, 5, 7 and 18) and does not have the luxury of being a trophy hunter.  His main objective is to fill the freezer.

He is a firefighter/paramedic and has a good amount of time to hunt the woods outside Parkville, Missouri, near the Kansas border.  He had already killed two does and now the rut was on and was waiting for a nice buck to walk out.

On November 4, he was perched in a tree in the bottom of a wooded bowl and had already seen two nice bucks earlier in the year and was going to try and draw them in by rattling.  He soon spotted a buck up the ridge and then another smaller one but then out of the corner of his eye spotted a huge tine 40 yards away in the timber.

He blew into his grunt tube and urged the buck into rage.  The deer thrashed a tree and then came in grunting.

"I've never seen something so nasty," he said "I had no idea how big this deer was, other than it was the biggest deer I'd ever seen in my life."

The buck came in on a line and Pulse drew his bow, a Darton that was made in 1988 (Pulse fondly calls it his BowTech Banjo).

He picked a softball-sized opening in the brush below his stand and when the buck tromped through it, he squeezed the trigger on his release.

But the arrow hit a branch and sounded a harmless 'thud.'  It was one of the most depressing sounds Pulse had ever heard.

"My heart hit my shoes when I saw my arrow in the tree," he said.

But the buck didn't totally spook.  He started making his way up the ridge, while Pulse knocked another arrow.  At 40 yards Pulse fired again as the buck quartered off.  This time his air was true and he hit the
deer square.  After a short tracking job he found the buck dead, 40 yards up the ridge.

"He looked like a rocking chair tipped over," Pulse said.

While the deer's rack is incredible, his body size is perhaps even more impressive.  Pulse never got his buck weighed, but you can see just how enormous he is in this picture below.  For reference, Pulse stand 5'10" and weighs about 200 pounds.

He had a buddy to help him get the deer out of the woods and quartered because in two days the Missouri Youth Hunt was coming up and he wanted to take his seven-year-old son, Garrett hunting.  As you can see below, like father like son with the camo face, his son took down a 9 point buck. This was Garrett's first deer!

My congrats to both the father and son in our great outdoors!  What an awesome and terrific hunting stories to tell for a lifetime!

Bill Pulse and his mounted 23-point buck!