Some outdoorsmen think their hunts are ruined if they inadvertently step on a stick or fail to stifle a sneeze or cough. In their minds, such are the noises that send deer packing.
Chris Flanders isn’t wound that tight.
Less than four hours after he and his brother, Alan, wrestled a 20-foot-tall ladder stand into place and cut virgin shooting lanes, the 38-year-old Iowa bowhunter christened it.
The Flanders secured the stand to an oak beside a freshly cut soybean field about 1:00 on Oct. 27. The field was part of the Monona County farm to which they have hunting rights.
“We weren’t very quiet about it,” Chris said. “We made a lot of noise. We even cut limbs.”
After the job was finished, Chris went home to collect and drop off his son with a babysitter. When he returned to the farm about 4:30, he was decked out in Realtree-patterned Scent-Lok and dripping with Super Charged Scent Killer.
To that point in the season, he’d invested about 18 hours in stands, so he was eager for a change of scenery.
Thirty minutes after he settled into position, his rattling attracted an 8-pointer. Soon after it left, another 4x4 approached from a different compass point.
When Chris clashed the antlers again at 6:00, a curious forkhorn showed. Next up was a much bigger deer he saw coming through the timber 60 yards distant.
“I knew the antlers were thick. That’s really all I could tell when it first stepped up to the fencerow at 40 yards,” he said. “But when it turned to look to the left, to look at the forkhorn, I saw a row of points.”
Fortunately for Chris, the buck jumped the fence and strolled to within 25 yards. The hunter’s urrrppp was followed by his arrow’s thwack.
“Nobody knew this deer existed,” he said. “We had no photos. It was like it dropped out of the heavens to me!”
His brother came up with 208 4/8 inches, which he says is conservative. He thinks the score could hit 214.
That was the second rack Alan measured this year. Four days before Chris struck gold, he shot a 202-incher from the other side of the same farm.
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