When Josh Stephenson saw the tsunami rolling through the yellowed stalks, he stood and grabbed his bow. Whether the parting corn represented a Biblical shift or the opening of a new fault line near Danville, Ind., whether a robed and bearded man, a herd of deer or geology was to blame, the 25-year-old bowhunter wasn't going to find out without clipping his release to the string.
He didn't sit down again until the arrow he'd nocked was long gone, along with the bulldozer of a buck it skewered en route to the ground. Josh was breathing as if he was the one with a hole through his bellows.
Three years of waiting and hoping had ended after only one hour in a stand Josh almost hated to use for fear of spooking the very deer he wanted so badly to tag.
After first seeing the buck while driving home one night, Josh knocked on his neighbor's door and asked if he could hunt the man's land. He wound up gaining access to a 10-acre draw surrounded by cornfields.
He hunted the place for two years before he actually saw the buck his trail camera was photographing. The draw was more travel corridor than bedding area, which meant getting a crack at the giant would be a matter of hunting his best of two stands only when conditions were perfect, which they were on a windy Nov. 9, 2013.
Before climbing into his stand near the edge of a standing cornfield, he checked the nearby camera and discovered the bull of the woods had passed in front of it at 1:30 - just two hours earlier!
It came back an hour later, and Josh used a snort-wheeze and a couple of grunts to lure it into bow range. The mock scrape might've sealed the deal.
After impact, the buck stopped and looked around, as if searching for the rival that had gored him. When it saw nothing, it ran out of sight. Josh thought he heard a distant crash a few seconds later, but he chalked it up to wishful thinking.
It might've been wishful, but his thinking was as on target as his arrow. A couple of hours later, Josh and a two-man cheering section found the dead buck.
There's more to the story, but you'll have to read it in Rack magazine this fall. The deer's BTR composite score is 222 2/8.