Alfred Matter had to have wondered why his father was waving at him. The boy was driving a tractor, cultivating sunflowers, when he spotted the signal that usually meant it was time for lunch.
Jim Matter, father of seven, had a habit of taking off and waving his shirt whenever it was lunchtime. When this happened in 1973, however, his third-eldest son was mistaken. Alfred's father wasn't waving his shirt.
"As Alfred got closer to the object he'd assumed was me, he did a double take," Jim, now 82, told Duncan Dobie, who's writing the story for Rack magazine.
"It was a huge deer thrashing its massive antlers on some of the tall sunflower plants," Jim said. "Alfred told me it was an awful big buck. He said 'It had all sorts of points and strips of velvet hanging off the antlers.'"
They assumed the big whitetail was the one that had set neighbors' tongues wagging. The postman for that corner of Becker County, Minnesota, had even taken a shot at it.
On Friday morning, Nov. 12, Jim's older brother, Jerome, called to invite him to go deer hunting. The plan was for Jerome and one of Jim's employees to do some scouting down by the river, while Jim finished up some plowing.
Jim was still on his tractor when he spotted two bucks and a doe near a cattail slough several hundred yards across the field. One buck dwarfed the other.
"I shut off the tractor, grabbed my rifle and sneaked out the door of the cab," Jim said. "Since the country was almost entirely open, I began a long stalk toward the three deer, mostly crawling on the ground."
It took him an hour and a half to crawl within 75 yards of the trio, only to see them run when his hired man - asked by Jerome to see what was taking Jim so long - drove past them.
Jim and his employee ultimately mounted a second stalk, and Jim wound up shooting both bucks (the second for his helper). The neck shot that toppled the big one had been from 400 yards.
The giant's rein as Minnesota's state (B&C) record lasted only a year. The following year, Mitch Vakoch shot a massive buck in Norman County that pushed the Matter Buck into second place.
Jim's 34-pointer was measured for the BTR in 1994. Its composite score is 263 inches.
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