Casen Hutfles climbed into his towering tree stand just after 4 p.m. on Oct. 29. The 25-foot-high ladder stand overlooked a travel corridor for deer, a lane where two fingers of woods met. But Huftles had just one deer on his mind that afternoon.
“As soon as I got out of school I headed to the woods, walked in and climbed up,” the 16-year-old hunter tells Outdoor Life. “The stand didn’t have a seat. So, for two hours I stood [there], hoping I’d see the buck we called ‘Wideload.’”
The whitetail buck was one that Casen and his dad Jeff had been seeing on trail cameras for six years on a private farm near their home in Onaga, located in northeast Kansas. Since 2019, they’d seen the buck grow into a 12-pointer, and then watched as the number of tines shrank with age. It had dropped to 10 points in 2024, and by the time they saw photos of the buck in late October, it was a heavy and wide 8 point.
“We got him on a trail camera just a few days earlier, and this was the first time I hunted that stand this season” says Casen, a student at Onaga High School who plays basketball and baseball. “It’s a natural deer traffic area, and we had a mineral block out and some corn.”
Just after 6 p.m. two does appeared and began feeding at 25 yards. Casen then spotted another doe running through the timber with Wideload on her tail.
“The running doe came straight to me,” he says. “She stopped almost under me, and I got ready with my bow. Wideload stopped at 24 yards, and I raised my bow and shot.”
His fixed-blade broadhead hit Wideload behind the shoulder, but the shot looked high from his vantage point. The buck jumped and ran into a bean field, then turned into the timber and fell.
“I called my dad right away and he and my grandfather came out with an ATV,” says Casen. “I thought I’d hit him high, but the steep angle down to the deer from my tree stand turned out to be perfect for that arrow.”
Wideload had only traveled 75 yards. They field dressed the deer and took it to their house, where they processed the meat themselves.
The buck has not yet been officially scored, but its rack is impressive. The inside spread is 21.5 inches, with main beam lengths of 23 and 22.5 inches, and 11-inch-long G2s. Both bases are five inches around in circumference.
Wideload is also just the second buck Casen has tagged with a bow. His first, taken in 2024, was a 14-point giant that scored 187 inches. He killed it with the same Matthews bow he used this season, just 1.5 miles from where he arrowed Wideload.
“I’m going to have [a shoulder mount of him] facing left, the opposite way that I had my buck I got last year mounted,” he says. “This way both bucks will be looking at me in my bedroom, and I can always enjoy seeing them, and the memories of those hunts.”
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