XBow buck #2 typical in IL
By Patrick Dunning
Deer hunting, like baseball, is a game of failure. Major-league hitters who strikeout 70% of their trips to the plate still bat .300 and enjoy hall-of-fame worthy careers.
Northern Illinois’ Brent Dykstra knows the weight of failure all too well. He was a relief pitcher at Northern Illinois University in the late 90s for a team that had a .500 record his junior year, despite having the lowest ERA in the bullpen that season. And his senior year, NIU won a mere 10 contests.
He loved every second of his collegiate days; it’s where he met his wife Stacy, and he now serves as the head baseball coach at Fulton High School for a team that’s won back-to-back regional championships, and going for a third this spring.
“Always remember the failures, that’s what you learn from. What you didn’t do right will prepare you for the next opportunity. That’s why I was so much more relaxed the next time I saw this deer,” Brent said.
Brent’s family has a 136-acre farm in Savanna with plenty of huntable timber. He wanted to get more involved with the property and started putting out trail cameras in 2018 to see what caliber of deer frequented the area.
He immediately identified a 10-pointer with potential, and Brent’s brother-in-law Adam had an opportunity to shoot it as a 3 1/2-year-old in 2019 but couldn’t get an arrow off.
“That was our first, real encounter on the hoof with him. I saw him after that but he was always 100 to 200 yards away. He knew how to avoid people.”
On a cold November day in 2021, Brent was getting down from his stand at 11 a.m. and saw his target buck chasing a doe through the timber. The doe got to within 20 yards, and Brent was silently begging the buck to follow suit.
“He’s on one hill and I’m on the other. She’s down below both of us and I’m waiting for him to get broadside. The doe started stomping and I didn’t measure the distance before I shot. He was actually standing at 40 yards and I had him at 50,” Brent told Buckmasters. “I should’ve let her calm down and he would’ve been in front of me at 20 yards. Sent the bolt right over him and thought I blew it.”
The Carroll County buck disappeared from the farm all of 2022. Brent assumed the worst.
The now 12-point stud emerged on camera the day before Halloween in 2023 for the first time since Brent whiffed a bolt two years prior. His first sit of the year proved to be an afternoon with a lot of deer movement and a little luck.
“They say Halloween is the start of the rut here in northern Illinois. I decided to give it a shot and see what happens. I had some bucks come along the fence and a small buck come to the uncut beans in front of me,” Brent recalled. “Out of the corner of my eye, to my east, two other small bucks came out and started chasing this doe in front of me. An 8-pointer came out snort wheezing and goes back into the timber. I look to my right and there’s big boy, standing there at 40 yards with his head down moving along, not too alert.”
When the mainframe 9-pointer quartered away just enough, Brent pulled the trigger on his crossbow and watched as the buck tore through the timber it came out of.
Brent located blood and called his neighbor Jim to help further with the recovery. Past a block of timber, Brent said there’s a berm and a steep drop-off that serves as an easement for the railroad track. His buck laid still in that 10-foot ditch.
He tied a log strap to his truck and hoisted the deer onto level ground and snapped a few photos.
“I was obsessed with this deer. I stopped hunting everywhere else and it burned me out. All day sits in a stand, it got to the point where it was really frustrated. I wanted to quit,” Brent said. “This is a once in a lifetime buck. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time.”
Buckmasters master scorer Lowell Dickman measured this wall hanger at 180 inches for Buckmasters Trophy Records. Brent’s buck is the second largest typical in Illinois felled via crossbow, to date.
The rack’s main beams measured 27- and 28 2/8 inches and featured four circumference measurements over six inches.