Big Buck 411 Blog

Déjà vu with a Different Ending

Déjà vu with a Different Ending

By Mike Handley

Eighteen-year-old Brooks Jacobsen hopes he’ll one day be a veterinarian capable of stanching wounds. For now, the student at Wayne Community School is happy to inflict them.

In 2016, the kid from Corydon and his mentor, Jeremy McCarty, gained hunting rights to acreage in south-central Iowa. They scouted, hung stands and put out trail cameras to inventory the neighborhood whitetails.

Despite collecting photographs of a few head-turning bucks, the teenager did not punch his tags that year or in 2017. But he sure made up for it this season.

In late October, Brooks retrieved images of a gorgeous buck that had passed in front of the lens three times in five days. Taking advantage of a cold front, he went after it on Halloween.

“At 5:45 p.m., I saw antlers in the brush. The buck was hitting a couple of scrapes and rubbing trees,” Brooks said. “When I grunted, it answered and came in fast. I could see the hair standing up on its back.”

When the pugilistic buck didn’t see a challenger from 27 yards, it turned and began walking away from the frustrated bowhunter, who threw out a hail-Mary, snort-wheeze call.

Unbeknownst to Brooks, a second buck had crept in from behind his tree. Its appearance was soon knownst to the bull of the woods. The two deer fought before going their separate ways, and the young hunter could only watch.

Brooks’ third trip afield in 2018 was on Nov. 11. He was 21 feet aloft in his stand about 45 minutes before daylight.

At 7:55, he heard leaves crunching and saw his dream buck was 75 yards away, coming down the same trail it had taken on Halloween, when it hadn’t given him a shot.

The deer came all the way to his tree. It even sniffed the steps of the climbing sticks.

“I was confident at that point,” Brooks said. “I thought, You’re going to give me a shot. You’ve finally made a mistake!”

And so it went.

The deer hasn’t been taped yet, but there are a lot of inches to be tallied.

— Read Recent Blog! Coming Attraction: Taylor Drury has been deflating whitetails since she was 12 years old. Last season, the 23-year-old arrowed her biggest ever, an Iowa buck wearing nearly 190 inches of bone.

Copyright 2024 by Buckmasters, Ltd.

Copyright 2020 by Buckmasters, Ltd