An awful lot of big buck photos have been shared on social media in the last couple of weeks, and a surprising number of them have been monstrous Typicals. Among those pushing or exceeding the 200-inch mark was a Wisconsin buck taken by Kevin Christorf.
Several photos of the outstanding 6x7 have been shared, but one taken by a neighbor who helped Kevin recover the animal, an impromptu snapshot of the 32-year-old hunter and his buck next to the canoe used to reach the land he was hunting, gained the most traction. That image will soon grace the cover of Rack magazine.
Kevin's Trempealeau County whitetail has been rough-scored at 200 5/8 inches, a shoo-in to be the Badger State's next No. 1.
Buckmasters' current Wisconsin record among crossbow-felled Typicals is Heather Alexander's 2016 brute from Crawford County, which tallies 186 5/8 inches. If Kevin's buck maintains its score, not only will it be a state record, but it also will be the category's No. 5 in the world.
Kevin, a state employee from Curtiss, Wisconsin, put a bolt through the deer his neighbor had nicknamed Hector - after Achilles' arch rival, the prince-warrior of Troy - on Oct. 28.
Rainstorms were forecasted for that afternoon, but Kevin decided not to waste the morning. He'd been able to hunt the small tract only a handful of times to that point in the season.
He woke early and loaded his gear into a canoe to paddle across the river, the only way to access the 5-acre, landlocked parcel from his father-in-law's place. He was in the older of two hang-on stands about 30 to 45 minutes before legal shooting light. Shortly after the clock was right, he saw the buck walking in the neighbor's cornfield, headed for the river.
The deer eventually wound up downwind of Kevin, stamped its foot, and then reversed course. Just when all seemed lost, however, it came back, all the way to the base of the tree in which the open-mouthed hunter was sitting.
"The deer actually licked the tree pegs and looked up at me," Kevin said. "I was really high, maybe 25 or 26 feet, which is probably the only reason this all worked.
"When it got upwind of me, where it could no longer smell me, it became even more nervous, more alert," he added.
Rather than give the increasingly nervous whitetail more time to decide if something was truly amiss, Kevin pointed his crossbow downward and took the shot while the animal was barely 5 yards from his tree.
Seeing the buck barrel away wasn't particularly confidence-building, but hearing it crash certainly helped. So did the splotches of red in the deer's wake.
Before getting down, Kevin called his wife, Bayli, his father-in-law and the neighbor, Dakota, who'd first alerted the Christorfs of the deer's presence. The latter joined him for the short tracking job.
"When we got to the deer, I dropped the bow - or let the strap sort of slide off my back - and tackled Dakota. Then, I just started crying. A lot of what happened after the hunt is a blur, but Dakota got much of it on his phone."
"I feel like I'm going to wake up any minute. It'll all go downhill from here," Kevin laughed. "Somebody upstairs was looking out for me."
There's more to this incredible story, but you'll have to read about it in an upcoming issue of Rack magazine.
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