How many times have you driven past a parcel and noted how deer-infested it looked? How often have you bothered to find out who owns it, or actually knocked on a door to seek permission to hunt the ground?
For Luke Beaty, a 27-year-old business owner in Wentworth, Missouri, the answers are 1,000 and one, and he’ll be forever grateful he acted.
Luke first spotted the buck he came to call “Cactus Jack” while en route to check on some cows in 2023. He’d often thought about asking permission to hunt the place, but actually seeing the deer was the push he needed to knock on the door.
“I drove by that farm in Lawrence County, Missouri, a thousand times, always thinking it would be a good place to hunt,” he said.
Luke acquired permission to hunt the neighboring 140 acres, and wasted little time in erecting a popup blind only 150 yards from the main road.
“My dad advised against it, saying I shouldn’t want people to know I was hunting there. But I wanted EVERYBODY to know the place was being hunted; not that I was there necessarily, but that someone was,” he said. “We have a problem with trespassers, and I wanted a deterrent.”
Over that and the next year, he had eight or nine encounters with the giant whitetail, always opting not to take the iffy shots. The closest was a 25- to 30-yard opportunity obscured by brush.
For 2025, he decided to hunt smarter, to cut down on the pressure.
“I wanted to give the buck more room, to become super-picky about when I’d hunt, so I could keep my scent and my stuff out of there as much as possible,” he said.
The extremely cold morning of November. 9 would’ve been one of his few outings, but Luke awoke to 30-mph winds and decided to go to church. When he went out that afternoon, the buck at the top of his list crossed in front of him as he drove into the property. He watched it traverse two nearby fields, and then he decided to hike the nearly 3/4 mile to where he’d planned to hang a saddle stand, about 12-feet up a tree between two bedding areas.
He left the setup — everything except his bow — in the woods when he left that night.
Luke was in the saddle by 4:30 the next morning, November. 10. He saw several small bucks and does early, and then he spotted the big one at 100 yards, heading away from him. He assumed the whitetail’s mission was to check a bedding area for receptive does, the only rutting behavior he’d witnessed to that point in the season.
“The rut was weird this year, maybe because it was unusually hot. I think we had two cold fronts the entire season,” he said. “I saw no hard chasing at all, even though this buck was definitely looking.”
When the buck didn’t return, Luke decided to wait until 10:30 to try rattling. As soon as he did, a doe stood below him. He also glimpsed a good buck 70 yards distant. Since he’d left his binoculars in his truck, he looked at it through his rangefinder and realized it was his “Most Wanted”.
While it appeared the deer heard the clashing of antlers, it seemed to lose interest and began walking away.
“That’s when I tried to call him with one deep grunt and two snarky ones,” he said.
The tactic worked, luring the animal to one of the three shooting lanes in front of Luke. When it was a mere 17 yards away, it saw Luke drawing his bow and froze.
“I knew it was about to leave, so I just snapped it on back and released,” Luke said.
“I bested my record in 2024 with a double-beamed buck that scored 175 6/8-inches,” he said. “I never thought I’d beat that one, let alone the very next year. My best before the 2024 buck was in the 160s.”
The 2025 season was the best Luke has ever had. He wound up with four bucks, two by bow and two by gun. Three came from Missouri, and the fourth was an Oklahoma specimen. His third home-state buck was taken during a special city park draw hunt.
“I took in 700-inches of antler in those four bucks,” he said. “I also had to go out and buy another freezer.”
Several people knew of and were hunting the estimated 8 1/2 to 9 1/2-year-old deer.
“The buck traveled an 8-mile circle,” he said.
Doug Walden put the tape to Luke’s buck for Buckmasters, arriving at 232 ⅛-inches. The 31-pointer, a mainframe 5x6, is the largest bow-felled Irregular ever recorded from Lawrence County. It ranks No. 5 in the state.
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