Before dawn on Oct. 27, Blake Treisch was driving to a friend’s farm in north-central Ohio. Everything was going well until he got pulled over by a local policeman because he had an unlighted license plate.
“It took almost an hour for him to write me a ticket,” Treisch tells Outdoor Life. “I told him I was going deer hunting that morning, but he didn’t seem to care and took his time.”
He had his mind on a giant symmetrical buck with plenty of stickers.
“I had a few previous encounters with that buck,” says the 27-year-old, who just finished his Marine Corp service last year. “We were playing cat-and-mouse. I almost had him close using a decoy, but he turned away at 60 yards. Another time, last Thanksgiving Day, he showed up on camera near where I had a stand. It was incredible, because the whole family watched the buck on my phone, as the camera recorded him, and I wasn’t on stand.”
After the officer sent him on his way that morning, it was well after daylight when Treisch reached the area he intended to hunt from his saddle.
“It was almost 8 a.m. – long after when I wanted to be hunting. I was looking for good trees to climb, making lots of noise, and was about ready to move to another spot. Then I saw the buck I’d been after standing in the nearby corn field. He was all bristled up from the rut and he was working a mock scrape I’d made.”
The deer was 25 yards away, and intent on the scrape.
“I was standing in a little dip in the ground inside the woods, and I think he thought I was another deer from all the noise I’d been making,” says Treisch, a railroad employee. “The wind was even blowing straight toward him. But he was really bristled up from the rut. I also was in full camo, and in that little swale.”
Treisch nocked an arrow, then drew, released, and sent an expandable broadhead through the buck’s rib cage. The arrow sailed completely through the deer, hitting both lungs on the way.
“He turned around and went back into the corn, and dropped about 60 yards away,” Treisch said. “It was an easy tracking job.”
Treisch called his father, Ron, and the two men recovered the giant buck, which weighed about 200 pounds.
“I drove to the property owner’s house to show him the buck. The landowner said the neighbors were gonna be disappointed because they’d all been after that buck. They were getting lots of nighttime photos of him. But the only daylight photos of the buck were from my cameras.”
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From his trail cameras, Blake learned the buck had been bedding in an area just 200 yards from where he’d shot the deer.
Blake next took the 16-point buck to Toby Hughes for official Buckmasters scoring. Huges measured the deer at 192 6/8s inches. It’s a once in a lifetime trophy for any hunter, but especially when arrowed while standing on the ground. They estimated the buck was five or six years old.
“This whole thing,” he says, “is pretty incredible.”
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