Bob Dieball had already drawn and let down his bow once, when the Kansas buck he so desperately wanted veered sharply toward the doe it desperately wanted.
That he got a second chance blows his mind.
A few minutes after the first close call, the buck returned and stopped at 16 yards, facing - but not seeing - Bob. Head down, it was still staring at the doe. When she bolted, her wannabe suitor half-spun and exposed his left shoulder and side.
"I have no idea how I managed to stay calm enough to make that shot," said Bob, a grandfather who began bowhunting when arrows were made of wood and cams were found only in car engines.
Bob knew exactly which whitetail he'd arrowed. Until that moment, the deer had been completely nocturnal. Bob had pored over four years of trail camera photographs and video footage of it, and he'd even found its left shed - 90 inches of bone - the previous February.
The neighbors knew about it, too. They'd nicknamed the photogenic deer G3 because he had parallel points at that spot on his left beam in 2011, 2012 and 2013. The inner tine disappeared in 2014, but everything else was present and bigger.
Finding the shed antler is what really stoked Bob's furnace, though he suspected that seeing the buck from a deer stand would be a long shot.
He decided his best chance - beyond crossing his fingers - would be to build a candy store for deer: food plots and mineral supplements. He also hung and monitored trail cams along the stamped-down pathways leading to and from alfalfa.
The first and only time Bob actually saw G3 in sunlight was during the waning hours of Nov. 4, 2014. The heart-shot buck fell within sight a few minutes later.
"My heart was pounding so hard, I really wished I'd had a nitro pill in my pocket," he said.
The 19-pointer is a new runner-up to the Sunflower State record among Typicals felled by compound bow. Had it broken that record, it would've been this year's winner of the Golden Laurel Citation.
Its BTR composite score is 212 6/8 inches.