Bowhunting conditions were ideal on Friday afternoon, when 34-year-old Mitch Piepenburg headed toward a small food plot surrounded by a dense private swamp in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin.
“I’d been getting trail camera photos of the buck in the food plot for a couple days and I thought that afternoon might be the time to get him,” Piepenburg tells Outdoor Life. “I had a stand on the field edge, but the wind was bad for it. So, I carried in another stand with some ladder sections and placed it so the wind wouldn’t be bad for hunting.”
The temperature had dropped 10 degrees from the previous day, as a high-pressure front moved into the area.
“It was a dead still evening, perfect for bowhunting,” says Piepenburg, who owns Steve’s Auto shop in Chilton. “I figured the buck was bedded near the food plot and I was watching a spot I thought sure he’d come front. But he came from the opposite direction. I never heard or saw him until he was 15 yards from my tree stand.”
The buck came directly to Piepenburg and began making a scrape almost directly under his hang-on stand.
“When he started pawing the ground and rubbing his horns in brush and making some noise, I stood up, turned around, and came to full draw. I shot, and thought I heard my arrow hit some brush. The buck ran out into the food plot, stopped, looked around, and I thought I’d missed him.”
The buck was standing broadside at 32 yards, so Piepenburg nocked another arrow, knelt to thread tit through tangled cover, and released.
“I heard a ‘whack,’ and he turned and ran into the timber and toward a bean field off my property,” he said.
Piepenburg phoned his father, Steve, and then talked to his hunting buddy Jake .
“I told them I’d shot the buck I was hunting for years. Jake had a remote trail camera on the field edge, and he’d gotten photos of me in my stand and the buck running out of the field after I’d shot it. He knew something was happening with deer, and he called me in my stand, asking ‘What’s going on?’”
Mitch decided to wait four hours before tracking, since he was unsure how well he’d hit it.
“I didn’t want to mess it up with such a great buck,” he said. “I’d been hunting this buck for years – longer than I’ve been married, and long before I had my three kids.
After waiting four long hours, Mitch, his dad Steve and Rortvedt went to the place where the buck had stood in the field, and there was a heavy blood trail. They easily followed it to the buck.
It had traveled only 80 yards. Both of his arrows had hit home behind the shoulder.
“I’d seen this buck so many times on camera and in the woods, it was like hunting a ghost. Several times I almost shot him. But he was either too far, or it was after legal hunting hours. I never could put together the right time and place to take him until that evening.”
Mitch will have the massive 16-point buck officially scored; in the meantime, he says its been rough scored at almost 200 inches.
“He was much bigger a few years ago, maybe as much as 220-inches,” says Mitch, a dedicated bowhunter with many 140-inch bucks to his credit. “He was injured horribly a few years ago, and I really thought he might not make it he was so badly hurt. I think a car hit him.
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“But he survived, recovered, and he seemed okay that evening I shot him. He was a very smart deer, who seemed to know more about the hunters after him than we knew about him … He’s a special deer for me, and to a lot of others in the area who knew he was around.”
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