One of the finest whitetails Illinois taxidermist Matt Cheek will mount this year will be the one he almost didn’t shoot on Nov. 1.
If the archery permits allotted for the 8,050-acre Pere Marquette State Park hadn’t been so few and coveted, Matt might’ve stayed home during the downpour. He almost did anyway.
After sleeping in and spending the morning in his studio, he reluctantly met his buddy, Jeremy Hall, at the park just after lunchtime.
“We had gone in and scouted two weeks prior and picked out promising locations,” Matt told Gita Smith, who’s writing his story for Rack magazine. “We wanted to hunt off the beaten path, to venture deeper than other hunters.”
Matt’s 22-foot-high perch was on a ridge peppered with deer sign.
“I was in the stand by 1 p.m. It was still raining, and I was wondering if I’d made the right decision,” he admitted. “I was hunkered up against the tree, water dripping off me. I had no rain gear; never owned any.”
He almost called it quits at 2:30, but he decided to stick it out for one more hour. Thirty minutes later, he saw a deer – didn’t know if it was a buck or a doe – moving through some downed treetops 65 yards distant, heading his way.
When he finally got a glimpse of the animal’s rack, he didn’t need to count points. There was no doubt it was a shooter.
“I grabbed my bow, and then I stopped looking at antlers,” he said. “The buck headed westward and lifted its nose in the air to get a sniff. I felt a brief moment of panic before I realized the wind was blowing from the buck toward me.”
When the deer hit the 41-yard mark, a nervous Matt couldn’t wait any longer. His choice of sight pin was perfect, even though he thought he was taking a 35-yard shot.
He and Jeremy recovered the brute together.
“When we got to deer, it was kind of surreal. I replayed the day in my mind: You weren’t even going to go hunting. You were going to leave halfway through.
“I had to go sit on a stump for a while,” he said.
Matt’s impressive whitetail has not been taped for the BTR yet, but we’ll know the numbers soon.
— Read Recent Blog! Handlebars: Randall Oliver’s career-best whitetail hasn’t been taped for the BTR yet, but the antlers have been rough-scored at 227 inches.