Buckmasters’ Deer of the Year for 2019 is the new world record arrowed in Illinois last fall.
The largest free-roaming whitetail ever felled by a hunter, it wears a tag bearing Luke Brewster’s name. The 30-year-old former marine from Bristow, Virginia, shot it Nov. 2 on his grandparents’ Edgar County farm.
The Virginian drove the nearly 10 hours to his beloved Land of Lincoln the day before he loosed the fateful arrow. When he arrived, he and a friend, Justin, checked trail cameras and discussed the next day’s hunt.
Luke’s bow stand was in a hedge tree a half-mile from where Justin and another buddy would be hunting. He’d never seen the setup, but they had provided the GPS coordinates.
The morning was a bust, but things improved during Luke’s afternoon vigil.
About four hours after he’d settled in, he spotted a group of antsy does in a thicket downwind of his location. When they disappeared, he looked in the opposite direction and saw the buck he and his friends had nicknamed Mufasa, heading for a nearby scrape.
“I thought I was hallucinating,” Luke told Ed Waite, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “My brain was flashing alerts to my consciousness: It’s him. It’s HIM! I gotta do something. Now!”
Luke cautiously traded his binoculars for his bow. Shaking hands made attaching the release difficult, but he somehow managed to clip it on the string, draw, aim and let go.
Before sneaking back to his truck to wait on his friends, Luke went out to gauge the blood trail. He followed the sign with his eyes and realized the animal had crossed a nearby creek.
He didn’t have to cross it in order to see the fallen 41-pointer that would become the 29th recipient of Buckmasters’ Golden Laurel Citation, our Deer of the Year, which honors the previous season’s most significant entry into Buckmasters Whitetail Trophy Records.
Luke and his otherworldly, 353 5/8-inch whitetail will be at the Buckmasters Expo Aug. 16-18 in Montgomery, Ala.
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