Even more than he wanted to show me his world-record whitetail buck, Milo Hanson wanted to show me his Quonset.
Inside the modest outbuilding near the Grain Belt town of Biggar, Saskatchewan, was the nerve center of his tidy farm. There was his tractor and drum of hydraulic oil, and over there his rack of tools mostly in place on their pegboard, on the workbench various jars of bolts and nuts and greasy bearings.
But on the far wall was a collection of deer antlers that any hunter would be proud to display, the arc of Hanson’s career as a brush-busting Canadian meat hunter. He especially wanted to show me a wrist-thick swamp buck that came off his place — which he counted as his best deer before The One — along with a wide and deep-forked prairie mule deer. Piled in a corner were hundreds of handsome shed antlers of whitetails but also a few mule deer, elk, and moose.
This is how I remember Hanson, not only as the killer of the world-record typical whitetail deer, but as a chatty farmer happy to host a visitor on a chilly spring day on the prairie.
Hanson, who catapulted to fame in November 1993 when he killed the largest typical whitetail buck ever recorded by a hunter, died Monday. He was 81 years old. His buck, which measured an astonishing 213 5/8 inches, remains the all-time typical whitetail and is the standard which all trophy-class bucks are measured against. Hanson and his buck graced the covers of America’s major hunting magazines, including Outdoor Life. He was flown around the continent, to hunting shows and TV appearances. And he hosted dozens of luminaries on his Saskatchewan farm, all eager for his story and a look at the high-racked, impossibly tall and wide prairie buck.
I include myself in that procession.
Back in 2010, I was coyote hunting just down the road from Biggar and got Milo’s phone number from a mutual friend. I was as nervous as a freshman on his first date, but Milo’s calm and clipped prairie accent on the phone calmed me. Sure, he said, he’d be around whenever I stopped by. But he wanted me to know that his wife, Olive, was away visiting relatives so I shouldn’t count on any vittles.
All this week I’ve been recalling a few moments from our afternoon together. One was his open question: Did he do the right thing by not selling the buck? He was offered crazy amounts of money for it, he said, but every offer included strings that discomfited him. He had to relinquish copyrights to the story of his hunt. Or he had to give up all the shed antlers that may or may not have come from his “Hanson Buck.” Or the buck would be in a private collection and not visible to the public.
Instead of selling out, Hanson told me he sold parts — of the buck in the form of replica antlers, and of himself in various paid appearances.
“I was never offered $600,000 for that deer, but I bet I made $60,000 off it for over 10 years, so you do the math,” he said. Still, he wondered, what was the market for world-record-class bucks now, 17 years after he killed the deer? Would it fetch a million?
And Milo wanted to know when I thought his record would be broken, and where. We talked about the rising whitetail states of Kansas and Oklahoma and how it would take a combination of exceptional soil, gentle winters, protein-rich forage, and regulations that allowed an exceptional buck the chance to get old. None of which, we laughed, were necessarily responsible for the outrageous dimensions of the Hanson Buck.
Then we talked about the hunt and its immediate aftermath. As we walked around Milo’s farmyard, he showed me where he kept a pile of surplus barley from a bumper crop harvested in that fall of 1993.
“Normally when we kill a deer we hang it in the Quonset for a few days, to let it cool out and age a little bit,” he said. “And when we kill a real big buck, it’s a place where we can get the guys around and admire it for a few days. We did that with my buck for a day or two, but then over the next few days people came out nonstop to look at the deer. I started getting paranoid. Maybe somebody would want to steal this deer. I started hiding it. At one point I hid his head in the barley pile. When people would come out to look at it I’d have to dig it out of the grain, and it would have all this barley in its eyes and ears.”
“That deer deserves every bit of the attention it got. I was in the right place at the right time. All I did was pull the trigger.”
Then we piled in Milo’s pickup. I had asked if we could drive out to where he killed that buck. It was a little muddy, with scraps of dirty snow still on the lee side of windbreaks and shady sides of the little islands of birch and poplar in the middle of the fallow grain fields. Milo wasn’t sure we could get all the way out to where he put the final .308 bullet in the buck, but he could show me where it all went down.
We got out in the raw wind and Milo re-enacted the hunt, where his friends and neighbors had first seen the deer in the weeks and days before the fateful morning of Nov. 23, where he first saw the buck, where his buddies pushed the brush, where he missed the deer on his first encounter.
Then Milo’s voice got lower and a little rougher as he showed me where the buck busted out of cover about 100 yards from him, going away, and where the buck went down to his shot, then got back up again.
“That was a tough old deer,” Milo said, and we stood out in the field without any more to say as clouds scudded across the weak sun.
On the drive back to Milo’s house, he told me that he never felt comfortable with all the attention he got. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t in a hurry to cash in on his notoriety, and why it was easy for him to stay on the homeplace outside Biggar, to continue to farm and be a good neighbor. And to continue to add good-sized racks to the wall of the Quonset.
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“That deer deserves every bit of the attention it got. I was in the right place at the right time. All I did was pull the trigger.”
Maybe that’s Milo’s real legacy, as an example to all of us who take the field dreaming about encountering a deer like the Hanson Buck, imagining it could happen to ordinary hunters.
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