A family affair
3 generations bag giant Iowa bucks
Mike Stanley of Highland has killed a warehouse full of trophy bucks, but his most meaningful fell Dec. 6 in Iowa.
The giant whitetail sported a rack that scored 170 4/8 typical Boone and Crockett, just reaching the 170 minimum to qualify for all-time recognition from the Boone and Crockett Club. It’s the largest Stanley has taken and his only Boone and Crockett buck, but that’s only part of what makes it special.
Stanley killed the buck on heavily-hunted public land, but the most poignant element of the story is that Stanley got his buck within days of his son Michaiah Stanley and his granddaughter Moriah Stanley also bagging giant bucks. It’s the only time three generations of the Stanley family has experienced such a phenomenon in one helping.
“It’s bittersweet,” Stanley said. “Moriah saw two big bucks running together and she killed one of them. She thought it was the bigger one, but it wasn’t. She said, ‘Maybe Papa is meant to get the bigger one.’ ”
Iowa is a tough place to hunt deer. For starters, it’s cold. On the morning of Dec. 6, the temperature was 18 degrees with a light southwesterly wind.
Also, modern gun deer season in Iowa lasts only 14 days in two segments. The first segment runs five days, and the second segment lasts nine days. Non-residents must enter a drawing for a chance to participate. Stanley won a tag for the first gun season.
Stanley, a Baptist pastor, does not hunt on Sundays. He began his hunt on Monday Dec. 4, but he had too much company from other hunters on the Army Corps of Engineers property on which he hunted.
Michaiah Stanley hunted with his daughter Moriah, 15. Michaiah is also a pastor and leads a church in Seymour, Iowa. To get some separation from the other hopefuls in the area, he got permission to cross some private land to reach a remote portion of public land. He planned to hunt that evening with Moriah in hopes of catching a buck leaving public land in the evening to feed on private land.
That is how they came to encounter two big bucks. Moriah shot, believing she hit the bigger buck. It ran. Rather than risk pushing and losing a wounded buck, they withdrew and resolved to look for the buck in the morning. They found it 20 yards from where Moriah shot it. It scored about 125 typical Boone and Crockett.
Meanwhile, Mike Stanley was getting anxious. Time was getting precious. Not only is an Iowa deer tag hard to get, it is also expensive. The cold and lack of activity conspired to bring Stanley to the limit of his composure.
“On Tuesday, I marched in to where I was hunting and froze my tail off for two hours,” Mike Stanley said. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I went through a thing that a lot of hunters go through. I knew multiple places I wanted to go, multiple places where I might see deer. A guy can blow his mind thinking he ought to be somewhere other than where he is.
“At 8:30 [a.m.], I texted Michaiah and said, ‘Desperate men do desperate things, but I’m not going to get out of my game plan. I’m just going to go a little bit deeper.’ ”
Mike said that he was positive that big deer were in the area, but that they had probably retreated into thicker country to escape the pressure. On Wednesday morning, he walked farther into what he described as a “big, long, wooded draw.”
“I went in before daylight and walked nine-tenths of a mile with permission to cross private land,” Mike Stanley said.
In darkness, Mike Stanley nestled behind a fallen tree that offered relatively open sight lines. A few minutes after daylight, two does appeared. They saw Stanley but they didn’t spook. An 8-point buck strolled down the draw and started pawing a scrape about 60 yards away.
Curiously, that buck started walking back down the path from which he came.
“He put his ears back and started posturing, but there wasn’t a deer to be seen anywhere,” Stanley said. “I thought that was crazy. He should have kept walking due south, but he turned and started walking due north the way he came from. He was ‘bowed up’ the whole time.”
As soon as that buck left Stanley’s sight, Stanley saw motion due west. He watched it through binoculars and knew it was a big deer. That’s what raised the other buck’s hackles. He acted tough, but he didn’t want to tangle with the newcomer.
“I was telling myself, ‘Mike! Mike! Mike, don’t blow this! Don’t blow it!’ ” Stanley said.
The buck walked steadily through the brush. Concealed behind the fallen tree, Stanley shouldered his rifle and followed the buck through his scope. The buck reached an opening at 102 yards, and Stanley squeezed the trigger of his Ruger American rifle chambered in 350 Legend and punched the buck’s neck with a 165-grain Hornady FTX bullet.
“He piled up like a ton of bricks,” Stanley said. “I took time to text Michaiah. I said, ‘Son, it happened!’ ”
What happened after that was, as Stanley described it, a “horrible experience.”
“It was incredible to see a deer like that on the ground,” Stanley said. “I’ve killed about 250 deer, more than half with a bow, and I’ve been close to big deer I didn’t get. I took a picture of the deer laying there, but the deer was still breathing. I thought, I need to finish this deer off.’
“I jacked another round into the chamber,” Stanley continued. “That deer went from not moving to on his feet and getting out of there fast! I don’t know if the first shot just stunned him, but I’m just glad I watched all those old John Wayne movies back in the day!”
Like The Duke, Stanley made a snap shot on a running deer that was rapidly distancing himself from his antagonist. Stanley dropped him about 30 yards away.
Michaiah Stanley had already killed a buck in the fall with archery equipment. After spending a few days fruitlessly helping a maladroit friend kill a buck, Michaiah finally got a chance of his own to hunt with a firearm. He killed a mainframe 10-point that scored 174 5/8.
“A father and son within a space of five or six days killed two Boone and Crockett bucks hunting Arkansas methods on public land in the Midwest,” Mike Stanley said. “We weren’t hunting from shooting houses in [agriculture] fields. We just set up and used intuition from years of hunting public land in Arkansas.”
Mike’s buck was, according to Michaiah and Moriah, the same buck that Moriah thought she had shot.
“Call it destiny or whatever you want, but I guess Moriah was right,” Mike Stanley said. “I guess it was meant to be for Papa to get that buck.”