Three years ago, Luke Beaty was driving a rural road in southwest Missouri’s Lawrence County when he spotted a buck that took his breath away.
“He was huge, and he was on private land, so I started knocking on doors asking permission to hunt him,” Beaty tells Outdoor Life. “I got permission to hunt a 140-acre piece of private land in an area the buck was living in.”
Beaty spent time learning and walking the area and setting up trail cameras. He never had an encounter with the big buck that first season. Last year, he says, he counted eight different sightings of the buck, but he never got a chance to take it.
“He was a lot larger last year than this year, with even more sticker points,” say Beaty, a 27-year-old real estate agent from Dry Valley, Missouri. “Some other hunters in the area who’d seen the buck nicknamed him ‘Cactus Jack’, because his rack had so many sticker points.”
Oct. 9 was a windy Sunday in southwest Missouri. Beaty decided not to hunt because of the wind, and he went to church instead. After the service, though, he drove by the 140-acre property just to see what was moving.
“I was in my truck, and as I entered the road to the property, Cactus Jack crossed in front of me,” says Beaty. “I watched him walk through a back woods area, through a field and leave the property … That’s when I figured he was cruising, looking for does. I went back to my house, changed clothes, and got into the woods about 1 p.m.”
Using climbing sticks and a saddle, Beaty chose a spot just 10 feet off the ground. The tree canopy was low enough that if he’d climbed any higher, he wouldn’t be able to see trails below him. The spot was on a plateau of hardwoods with plenty of acorns on the ground — a good place for roaming, love-sick bucks looking for does. Some deer were bedded further down on the plateau, and Beaty was covered up with traveling whitetails that evening.
“Smaller bucks and does were everywhere, but I didn’t see Cactus Jack,” he says. “I stayed up until well after dark because I didn’t want to spook deer when I got back down on the ground to leave.”
It was 20 degrees the next morning at 5 a.m., when Beaty got back into his sling stand at the same hunting spot. Deer started moving through the area soon after daylight.
“I saw lots of does walking near my stand, and a couple 8-pointers,” he explains. “At 10 a.m. I spotted Cactus Jack at 100 yards, and I used a grunt call to get his attention. But he ignored the call and kept on cruising the area, looking for does I think.”
A short while later Beaty clacked a pair of rattling antlers, and not long thereafter he spotted some movement in the hardwoods.
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“I did a couple of rattling sequences and a few minutes later a doe started my way but there was nothing following her. But a few minutes later I heard something behind me, and I saw movement. Then I saw a bunch of sticker points and I knew it was Cactus Jack.”
Beaty made several grunts on his call, and that made Cactus Jack turn and start working his way. The deer came directly to Beaty, and at 17 yards the buck offered a slightly quartering away shot. He took it, and his arrow hit behind the buck’s shoulder, sending a 2-inch mechanical broadhead through the deer’s chest. The buck mule kicked, spun around, and disappeared into thick cover at 60 yards around 10:45 a.m.
Beaty immediately called his dad, Chuck, and told him what happened. He stayed in the tree for 20 minutes because he was shaking so much with excitement. He finally climbed down and walked to where the buck was standing. He found his arrow and saw the ground was coated with blood. The blood trail became spotty, so Beaty left for his truck, where he met his dad and his brother Jake.
“We waited until about noon before heading back to give Cactus Jack enough time to die,” Luke says. “We didn’t want to take any chances.”
Following tiny blood specks and splatters, they eventually found the deer not far from where it’d been hit. The deer didn’t leave much of a blood trail because the arrow had exited the animal low and in front of the off-side hind leg. The deer’s intestines had filled the arrow hole, so the bleeding was mostly internal.
The hunters dragged the buck to a fence, got permission from the neighbor to drive across their property, and then loaded the deer into their vehicle. They drove the deer to Chuck’s workshop, arriving there about 4 p.m.
The buck weighed an estimated 225 pounds, and they believe it was 8.5 years old. Cactus Jack has 39 total non-typical points, with 34 “scorable” ones. Beaty green-scored the rack using the Buckmasters method at 235 6/8s inches, and he says an official Buckmasters scorer will measure it soon.
“I’m going to have a full-body mount made of the buck jumping a fence,” Beaty says. “He’s best deer I’ll likely ever take. I’ll put him in my living room because it’s only room big enough to put such a large mount.”
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