Hunter: Rod Owen
Animal: 175 6/8" 11 Point Whitetail
Location: Kansas
Weapon: PSE Omen UF

When a doe runs by your stand with her mouth wide open and her tongue hanging out, it's a pretty good indication that things are heating up. I could hear her coming from over 100 yards away as I slapped my Dreamseason teamate to attention just seconds before her arrival. She made a complete circle around our well placed treestand as I could hear a buck grunting in the distance. I could not see him, but I could hear him from the time he topped a small ridge in the distance. Turning on the camera, if for no other reason than to capture the audio, I scanned hard to see just how big of a buck could be taking his sweet time to keep up with his new found love. And that's when I saw his rack coming down the ridge. Immediately I knew that he was a buck we had named "The Jolly Bean Giant".

You see, this was not our first encounter with this buck. I was in front of the camera on October the 23rd when a last minute direction change made this same buck take a path of 70 yards instead of the 40 yard path that he was in the process of taking. But that encounter just left me with my head against the tree and with the thoughts of what might have been.

The buck instead was going to have a few more weeks to roam the Kansas river bottoms. But the daytime movement of the 5 year old giant was fixing to come to an end. At 120 yards I picked him up in the view finder as he slowly searched and sniffed his way towards the tree, grunting repeatedly as he literally licked his nose with every step. At about 50 yards out he caught the wind of his "Hot Chick" that had circled our location. That was when he decided that the closest distance between point A and point B would be a straight line. That proved to be a deadly mistake. When he was 6 yards from the base of the tree, Rod stopped the buck in his tracks with the "maaaaahh". The Carbon Force Rage tipped Arrow blew through the bucks shoulder and buried into his chest cavity!

At 80 yards the buck was finished and fell in view of the camera! After a brief wait, Rod climbed down to make sure the buck was through. When the arms raised up and the war whoop started, I knew that the Jolly Bean Giant who had ruled our daydreams for weeks was down for the count! That was when the celebration, which included the "Bull Dance," began! Team Hart has 4 bucks on the ground with plenty of tags to spare. Within hours we were back up a tree and looking for the next contestant. Good luck everyone and kill em' big!

As told by Doug Hampton

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