Alan Flanders would rather count points than what-ifs.
Not that it matters now, but the events of Oct. 22, 2018, might’ve never happened if Alan’s buddy hadn’t botched a shot at a monstrous buck in 2017. He might still have an unpunched tag in his pocket if he hadn’t taken his little girl hunting, or if he hadn’t left work early two days later at the beckoning of a north wind.
So many variables.
One very dead deer.
One very happy hunter in Sloan, Iowa.
The deer he shot had been on his hit list since 2017, when it might’ve tallied in the mid-180s. He collected tons of trail camera photographs of the buck in velvet that year, but nothing when it should’ve been in hard antler.
He never saw it.
The same happened in 2018 until Saturday, Oct. 20, when Alan took his little girl to hunt the other side of a friend’s farm because the breeze was blowing out of the southwest. He needed a north wind to hunt where the bull of the woods had mugged for the photos.
When father and daughter got home that night, he combed through the trail cam images he’d collected and was astounded to learn that his Most Wanted had stepped in front of the lens five times, one of those a couple of minutes after sunrise.
When he saw that a north wind had returned, Alan left his concrete business early on Monday, Oct. 22. He went home to shower, and he was sitting in a chair inside his blind on the eastern edge of a 3/4-acre food plot by 4 p.m.
The buck arrived at a licking branch 68 yards away at 6:38.
“I was nervous as hell. I was shaking like a leaf,” said Alan, who routinely practices shooting at long distances.
“When it came to within 57 yards, I double-lunged it, although I originally thought the crossbow bolt had hit low and farther back than I’d been aiming.”
He needn’t have worried.
The antlers haven’t been taped for the BTR, but they’ve been rough-scored at 202 1/8 inches. The full story will appear in the April issue of Rack magazine, as will the tale of his brother’s even bigger 2018 whitetail.
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