Three seasons after his aging grandfather shot his last whitetail in 2013, Doug Kisamore connected with his best from the same backyard stand.
Nobody sat in the box blind on the eldest Kisamore's 4 acres in 2014. The homestead is mostly open except for 100 feet of thick brush at the rear of the tract.
After retrieving several trail camera photographs of the mostly nocturnal buck during the summer of 2015, Doug spent many fall evenings in the blind. He never saw the animal on the hoof, but he found its sheds the next spring.
By the time the 2016 season opened, he'd collected several photos of the now considerably bigger buck. When five weeks passed between images, he worried the deer had changed zip codes.
Or worse.
"By the time the deer reappeared in late October, I had done a pretty good job of keeping its existence a secret," he told Ed Waite, who's writing his story for Rack magazine. "But someone somewhere also got a photo of the buck and posted it on the Internet."
Almost immediately, the Kisamores noticed an uptick in nighttime road traffic. Not only was poaching a concern, but people were also knocking on Grandpa's door and asking for permission to hunt his land.
When Doug woke one Sunday morning to 5 inches of fresh snow, he decided to endure the cold inside the blind. He saw nothing until almost noon.
He was playing Yahtzee on his cell phone when he looked up to see the buck of his dreams stepping out of the brush as if it were emerging from a cloak of invisibility.
"Everything was covered with snow, so the buck was nearly invisible until it began to step clear," Doug said. "I had been watching that animal on camera for two years. Here he finally was, and I wasn't sure I was going to be able to remain calm enough to take the shot."
With trembling arms, Doug lifted his crossbow and stuck it out the blind's window. Waiting for the deer to turn just right tested his resolve.
When it did and Doug took the shot, the buck ran about 15 yards and stopped to scan the white landscape for danger. Unbeknownst to the hunter afraid to move, the deer was dying on its feet
After it toppled, Doug's trembling escalated into almost violent shaking.
"I sat there in the blind for at least 20 minutes before I started to regain some semblance of calm," he said.
The buck's BTR composite score is 240 4/8 inches.
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