It was late afternoon on Oct. 31 when Nate Daniels of Elwood, Kansas, climbed into an oak on his 40-acre lease. Daniels knows the Doniphan County property well, since he’s hunted it for 13 years.
From his 24-foot-tall tree stand, Daniels overlooked a creek drainage surrounded by hardwood hills, with corn and bean fields below. He was looking for a certain buck — one he’d been seeing there for the past five years.
“It was always between Oct. 20 and [early] November,” Daniels tells Outdoor Life. “He’d show up cruising hilltop benches, checking scrapes and looking for does.”
Daniels recalls a hunt in early November 2024, when he got a shot at the deer with his crossbow. The buck was standing downwind at 48 yards, but he missed it clean and never saw it again that season. Late in October of this year, however, Daniels was thinking about the big buck he’d missed last when a neighbor told him he had recent photos of that same deer.
“I knew the buck was back in the area,” says Daniels, a 42-year-old fishing guide on Smithville Lake. “He was right on schedule checking scrapes and looking for does. That’s when I decided to get back in the same oak stand that I’d missed him from last year.”
Daniels says Oct. 31 was a perfect 50-degree day, with a soft, warm wind blowing. He got into the stand at 3:30 p.m. and rattled a bit, attracting a few small bucks that cruised near his stand. He quit rattling after about an hour. Around 6 p.m. he heard something down in the creek drainage.
“A deer was pawing the ground and brush. And I heard the scrape-making sounds again, so I did a snort wheeze call to the buck,” Daniels says. “The buck down in the drainage was about 100 yards away, and it made the loudest snort wheeze back to me that I’d ever heard. Then I heard the deer noisily making the scrape again.”
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Daniels grunted softly. The scraping stopped.
“I figured he was coming,” says Daniels. “He showed up coming straight to my stand – not from out of the creek, but from directly behind me.”
Daniels had his Raven R10 crossbow up and ready. When the buck was a mere 2 yards away from the base of the tree, nearly below him, he shot.
“He was almost straight down underneath me when I shot,” Daniels said. “I spined him, and he dropped right there. I hit him with a second bolt to make sure.”
Daniels left the area, returning shortly with an ATV and his friends, Richard and Hunter Nance. They loaded the estimated 250-pound deer onto their ATV and took it to Daniels’ home where it was field dressed.
The buck’s heavy 21-point rack is massive. Both bases are 7 inches in circumference and nearly as thick as a man’s wrist. Daniels’ is reluctant to guess the buck’s score, as he wants to have official measurements made after the mandatory 60-day drying period is up. But he says one conservative green score put the rack at around 187 inches.
“It’s only the second buck I’ve shot on that property,” says Daniels, who already knows exactly where the shoulder mount will hang. “My wife Mary says this mount is going in our living room.
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