Hunter: Ben Rising
Animal: 139 4/8" Whitetail
Location: Iowa
Weapon: PSE

Well the year so far has been a real challenge in many ways as far as bad luck and no time to hunt. Our outfitting clients have been very successful but in order for that to happen my time must be given to the clients and therefor I don’t hunt much at all during the rut. My early season was a fiasco of intrusion from the landowner of my personal lease which in turn ran off my buck that I was truly after 1 wk before season opened. I tried some other farms for other good bucks but to no avail. I decided to just wait till my week and half off starting the 3rd wk of Nov .

My time off was going to be spent in Illinois and Iowa. After some crazy weeks of outfitting and harvesting some real good deer with our clients, I was headed to Illinois. We spent 5 days hunting all day every day. We had some great hunts but just didn’t have a 5yr old close enough.

Running short on time we headed to Iowa. Our first evening produced some great sightings and our hopes were high of killing a mature buck. After playing cat and mouse for a few more days we were convinced we were going home empty handed. The next to the last day of our hunt we decided to sleep in and hunt an oak ridge above a bedding area later in the day. We wanted to go in late because we had never been up on the ridge and wanted to be stealthy and knew early morning hunting had not been producing.

Upon getting up on the ridge and getting a place and settled in we seriously weren’t in the stand 10 min when my camera man Kenny Bevans said “there’s a buck coming right to us”. Sure enough a big old 5.5yr old 8pt was coming to the top of the ridge. He came to a fence and stopped. He started smelling the air trying to pick up some doe scent from the bedding area. He obviously smelled something he liked because he jumped the fence and I ended his life!

Thanks to Kenny for giving me 9 days behind the camera!!

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