Joel and Ryan Masters know that pine cones do not beget big bucks. They also know that birthdays play an all-important role in allowing even the gangliest of bucks to reach their potential.
They feed. They let little bucks walk. And they’re beginning to shoot great big ones.
Not that any of this has been a walk or roll in the park.
Joel was born with spina bifida, a condition in which part of the spinal cord is exposed and the nerves damaged. He’s been mostly bound to a wheelchair ever since.
“They gave up on me before I was a teenager; figured I’d have no quality of life. But here I am. A lot of kids born with this don’t make it,” said the 30-year-old flint knapper and prison ministry volunteer.
Hunting is a big contributor to his quality of life.
Joel and his father, Ryan, collected trail camera images of an 8-pointer with split brows in 2023. Although the mid-130s rack was sufficiently distinctive, its wearer was a young — possibly 3 1/2-year-old — deer then.
The Masters didn’t get any clear images of the buck off their 4,000-acre Sabine Parish lease in 2024.
“All the photos were from bad angles, blurry or distorted,” Joel said. “That’s why we began calling him “Sasquatch”. The best we could guess was that it was maybe a high-150s 10-pointer. Several people passed him up that season.”
A whitetail with a rack pushing 160-inches doesn’t normally get a pass anywhere in Sabine Parish, Louisiana. The reason the Masters and their fellow lease-holders weren’t eager to roll the dice is the members have had a self-imposed one-buck rule since 2016, and that buck must be 5 ½-years old.
“The rule means we have taken some phenomenal deer out of these piney woods,” Joel said. “Before this year (2025), the biggest was a buck called “Hercules”, taken by my dad, which scored 179 and change.”
They credit trigger restraint and an aggressive feeding program, since pine forests offer little quality browse. The property is also home to a lot of does, so there’s no reason for bucks to look far and wide.
“They’re content, and they’re more apt to reach their potential,” Joel muses.
Sasquatch made everyone’s hit list in 2025, however. He was wearing at least 170-inches.
“Dad was watching this deer like a hawk. The buck never really left the area. It was his home turf,” he said.
Just prior to the season, Sasquatch was daylighting on camera almost every day.
Since strong winds were forecasted for the afternoon of October 4, Joel and Ryan went to their homemade wooden box stand an hour and a half before daybreak. They wanted to beat the buck there.
It was dead calm when they arrived, but the breeze — blowing in a completely wrong direction — picked up as they waited.
With help, Joel can walk short distances and even pull himself up the stairs into the 15-feet-high blind.
The state’s first weekend had been set aside as a special, handicapped-only rifle hunt, and Joel was carrying his father’s scoped .30-06.
“We were very scent-conscious,” Joel said. “We kept all the windows shut until daylight, until shooting light really. That morning, as soon as we opened them, deer were already approaching.”
Soon into their vigil, Joel spotted the enormous whitetail and looked at it through his riflescope. He recognized Sasquatch immediately.
“He was so close, I was looking down on him,” he said. “The first thing I noticed was that his body dwarfed all the other deer out there. How he didn’t smell us is absolutely beyond me.”
“I was a nervous wreck,” he continued, “I guess if you’re not shaking up a storm, you’re just not a human.”
He lost sight of the buck for a few seconds, but when it reappeared, Joel wasted no time. Afterward, so many deer were running in so many directions, neither he nor his father knew if the shot had connected, if Sasquatch had fallen or if he’d skedaddled.
They needn’t have worried.
“From the time I put the scope on the rack — to verify it was the deer I thought it was — to when I squeezed the trigger was maybe only 30 seconds,” he added.
Greg Hicks measured the 15-pointer, Joel’s career-best, for Buckmasters, arriving at 183 ⅜-inches. It sits in the No. 5 spot among Louisiana’s rifle-felled Semi-irregulars.