The deer trails in Dylan Delk’s corner of Oz might not be paved with yellow bricks, but they’re often pocked with softball-sized green balls.
Folks call them horse apples in Nebraska. Oklahomans prefer the term mock oranges. And because their skins resemble a network of tightly woven lobes, the hard chartreuse spheres have also been referred to as monkey brains.
To the bowhunter from Hillsboro, Kansas, they’re simply hedge apples, the fruit of the osage trees often serving as wind breaks or property boundaries in largely open areas used for farming and grazing. Hedge trees are among the few choices for stand placement where he hunts, others being tripods and blinds.
Dylan has found a sweet spot in one of the many hedgerows on the property he hunts in Marion County. If it wasn’t already his favorite setup, it certainly is now that he’s arrowed his career-best whitetail.
Dylan saw this buck in 2023, when it was a young up-and-comer with lots of extra growth on its right antler. He later found both of its sheds.
“The antlers’ pedicels were only big around as quarters,” said the 32-year-old insulation plant supervisor. “I mean, really small. There’s no way it was older than 2 1/2 years at the time.”
He didn’t see the deer at all during the 2024 season because it was living on the adjacent property, according to the landowner, with whom Dylan has a great relationship. The buck returned in the spring, however, because it again shed its antlers on Dylan’s side.
In mid-June 2025, the still-developing whitetail walked in front of Dylan’s only camera, a unit monitoring the junction of two hedgerows. Dylan keeps tabs on two other “permission properties” as well as some family land.
The deer with the funky rack was in a class by itself, which allowed him to focus on the one parcel.
“I knew this deer was going to be something really special, and I knew I would have to do something to keep it on my place,” Dylan said. “I put out minerals and feed. I’ve always been a fan of minerals, but I’ve never been a corn guy. This was extreme.”
Dylan’s primary setup is a ladder stand in a hedgerow on the territory’s highest ridge, which traverses the middle of the farm he hunts. It’s at the edge of a pasture and easily accessible by a drainage.
“Bucks like to run that particular hedgerow because they can see a long ways,” he said. “People, however, might overlook it. Those hedge trees are nasty and require a lot of trimming, but it’s what we have to work with.”
Walls of osage trees dominate the land he hunts. There are also a lot of water drainages, too, all surrounded by soybeans and winter wheat.
The place has yielded great bucks for the last three years, including a deer Dylan and his wife, Kasey, referred to as The Bully. She shot the cantankerous animal in 2024, another factor which might have added incentive to his ’25 buck’s remaining on the property. The year before that, Dylan shot a 186-incher from it.
While visibility is unlimited later in the fall, leaf cover offers a few blindspots in September.
Leading up to the Sept. 15 muzzleloader opener, the buck was on camera every morning and evening. “The deer didn’t miss a day,” Dylan said.
“We named him Buzz Lightyear, since my 7-year-old, Maddox, had named another one Andy from the ‘Toy Story’ movie. My son is crazy about the outdoors and deer. He shot his first buck last year with a crossbow. And every day, he would ask, ‘Is Buzz on camera?’”
When Dylan and his cameraman, Lucas, headed out around 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 15, Dylan was carrying both his bow and his muzzleloader, the latter only for insurance. They wanted to film the hunt for Released Outdoors, their social media pages, and they had high hopes the patterned whitetail would appear at some point because the wind was perfect. The only question was how close it would get to them.
Dylan sat in a hang-on stand, while Lucas sat below him in a new ladder, a replacement for an old wooden one. They were maybe 200 yards from where Buzz had shed his two previous racks.
The evening’s first whitetails filtered into — or actually rose out of — the beans an hour later. Fifteen deer were feeding when a sun-baked Dylan saw a familiar 8-pointer with a sticker point sprouting from a base approaching.
Since he knew it was Buzz’s frequent traveling companion, he grabbed his bow without saying a word to his cameraman, who assumed he was going to go for the mainframe 4x4 and centered the deer in his viewfinder. Too many deer were too close for the men to risk whispering.
“Every deer we had on camera was out there,” Dylan said.
As the bowhunter expected, Mr. Lightyear arrived about 10 minutes before dark. He literally walked into the frame as Lucas was filming the 8-pointer, both in bow range.
“It happened so fast that we didn’t get much footage,” Dylan almost apologized.
“Originally, I thought I shot a little high and back (from where I wanted to hit it),” he said. “Seconds afterward, we heard what sounded like a deer thrashing in the beans and convinced ourselves the deer was dead or dying.”
Their theory was tested, however, when other deer carried on feeding as if nothing had happened.
When the guys felt enough time had passed, they got down and scoured the earth for the blood-soaked arrow. From there, a red carpet led them only 25 yards to the downed deer. The arrow had clipped the top of both lungs during its downward arc.
Brad Forbus measured the 18-pointer for Buckmasters, arriving at 202 6/8 inches. He scored it as a mainframe 4x6 with seven irregulars on the right and one on the left, which contributed more than 44 inches to its score.
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