Cody Huhn is a man possessed with hunting whitetails on public land. His hard-earned success in recent years has been remarkable, but the Iowa buck he arrowed this deer season is in a different class altogether.
“This is the pinnacle of my bowhunting life,” Huhn says of the 16-pointer he tagged in late October.
The 30-year-old bowhunter, of Osceola, says he’d heard about a giant buck roaming the bottomland thickets along White Breast Creek, which lies south of his home in central Iowa.
“I heard rumors about a 200-inch buck from friends and a coyote hunter I know,” Huhn tells Outdoor Life. “There’s a lot of public hunting land in that area, and I spent a lot of time, energy, and gas [scouting].”
He eventually found the buck in July, when it was still in velvet. Huhn says he located plenty of other good bucks while glassing and running trail cameras this summer. But they all paled in comparison to that one buck, which had a distinctive drop tine on its right side.
“In summer he was all over the place, and he shifted from summer to autumn range, probably moving about ¾ of a mile,” says Huhn, a 30-year-old videographer and YouTube producer. “He was like a ghost in the fall, and very smart.”
In time, Huhn learned that the buck was bedding in nearly impenetrable cover along the oxbows of White Breast Creek. The creek bottom was full of briars and willows, but there were very few large trees that could support a stand. So, he hunted from makeshift ground blinds, often near corn fields close to the creek.
He was in one of those blinds, set up in a thicket, the evening of Oct. 25, when the buck offered Huhn a shot. His arrow missed its mark, and the broadhead hit the deer but didn’t kill it.
“The arrow flew wild, and I knew it was a poor hit,” Huhn says. “I trailed the buck until tiny specks of blood led to a bedding area, so I backed out.”
Huhn would return to the area regularly over the next few days. He’d usually find a speck of blood or two, or some other fresh sign, and he even jumped the buck once.
Finally, on the cool, clear evening of Oct. 29, Huhn was in a different ground blind in the same area where he’d been pursuing the wounded buck. Just 20 minutes before the end of shooting light, the deer walked out of the cover onto a trail just 10 yards from his blind.
“He was so close and so wary that I didn’t know how I could draw my bow.”
But the buck stepped behind a willow clump just large enough that Huhn could draw his bow undetected. When the deer stepped out from behind the willows, Huhn sent a 3-blade, 100-grain, fixed-blade broadhead through the buck’s chest. He says the arrow hit both lungs and the heart, and the deer only went 45 yards before going down.
After walking back to his vehicle to get a cart, Huhn had to work just to get the big buck out of the creek bottom thicket. It was late at night by the time he finally drove home to Osceola.
Huhn says the buck has 16 scorable points, including the large and distinctive drop tine. The rack green scores around 206 ¼ inches, with an inside spread of 19 ¾ inches. Its longest main beam is more than 25 inches.
“I’m going to have a shoulder mount made of him by a taxidermist. I’ll hang him in my home next to the other bucks I’ve taken on public land. But he is by far the biggest one of the bunch.”
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