Playing the Wind
By Mike Handley
Had it not been a Sunday evening, Mike Nelson probably would’ve shot a doe on Oct. 15. But as much as he likes venison, he didn’t want to spend the next few hours elbow deep in it.
“It was just too much trouble,” he admitted. “I had to work the next day, so I didn’t want to stay up ’til midnight, cutting up that doe. I decided to just leave her out there as a decoy.”
The doe was the first deer the 61-year-old flooring installer saw while hunting that afternoon. She fed under a nearby apple tree while he talked himself out of shooting her.
This was 2017’s second sit in a bow stand for the hunter from Richland Center, Wisconsin. After putting opening-day angst behind him, he didn’t return to the area until the wind was right.
Being busted by or jumping the giant deer he so much wanted to shoot was the very last thing he wanted to do.
Mike saw the first photos of the giant in mid-August, when it stepped in front of one of his three trail cameras on the 24-acre tract north of town. He has three bow stands and one enclosed rifle stand from which to hunt, and he’s hunted the property since he was 12 years old.
The initial image came from the camera overlooking a ridge road.
“I got pretty excited,” he said.
Two weeks later, Mike began collecting photos from a second trail cam about 100 yards from the first and much closer to a 17-foot-tall ladder stand.
When Wisconsin’s bow season opened, the temperature was a blistering 88 degrees. Had it not been opening day, Mike would’ve probably stayed home. He really needed a wind from the west or northwest anyway, and it was blowing out of the south-southeast that weekend.
He sweated in the stand for four or five hours.
He didn’t return to the property until Oct. 15, a Sunday, when the breeze – a stout 21 to 36 mph – finally shifted in his favor: west-northwest. It had come out of the east with half the oomph the previous day.
Mike climbed the ladder at 3 p.m., and that’s where he was sitting when the doe got lucky.
He lost track of his live decoy around 5:30 and began scouring the landscape, even looking behind him.
“When I turned back around, I saw great big antlers as the buck was coming out of a draw,” he said. “It raked a tree and made a scrape, all the time watching the doe, which was about 20 yards from me.
“When the rubbing was done, the buck lowered its head, grunted twice, and went right through an opening,” he continued.
When Mike first drew his 15-year-old Mathews Outback, he had no shot and had to let off the bowstring. Meanwhile, two more does arrived to feed under the apple tree.
“It was about 15 minutes before 6:00,” Mike said. “When the buck stopped and turned around to look at them, I shot.
“The deer didn’t run, but it walked off real quickly,” he added.
Mike descended his ladder 15 minutes later and went to his truck. He drove home, told his wife, called buddies Dale Bender and Doug Duhr, and called his brother, Terry. The gang arrived at his home around 7:30, but they waited until 9:00 to start tracking by flashlights.
The blood trail was easy to follow, and it led them to within sight of Mike’s glowing nock.
“The buck apparently died before I ever got out of the tree,” he said.
“I never considered the ramifications of shooting such a buck,” he continued. “When I took it to the flooring store to be measured, I was there from 7:00 until 10:30. It drew a huge crowd. It also went viral on Facebook.”
The rack was green-scored by a coworker’s father, an official measurer, at 248 inches. Mike thinks the 200-pound (dressed) buck was 5 ½ years old.
“Richland County is on fire right now,” he said.