Every year, Kristi Purcell tries to celebrate her Nov. 7 birthday by hunting deer and turkeys on her farm in northern Missouri. This year would be no different, except Purcell had one particularly pertinent goal in mind: She wanted to shoot a 150-class buck.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She\u2019s tagged her share of 140-class 8-pointers over the years. Last year while rifle hunting, she noticed one mid-sized buck roaming around in the food plots, but she passed on multiple shot opportunities, hoping to give him another year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis buck just wasn\u2019t it. He had some character, but he had short points, and just wasn\u2019t what I was looking for,\u201d Purcell tells Outdoor Life<\/em>. \u201cSo I passed on him several times last year. But then I was bowhunting toward the end of October this year, right at the end of a cold snap, and I saw him walking across a bean field. He was about 200 yards away, but I could tell his beams came out long, he had good mass and character, so I was all excited, but I was shaking so bad from the cold and never got a chance on a shot [anyway].\u201d<\/p>\n A few weeks later, Purcell went hunting two nights before her birthday. A doe and some fawns showed up in a field she was hunting on before strolling into an adjacent pollinator plot out of her sight. Purcell expected the deer to move through the plot and move back into the beans next to the strip of timber where her tree stand was located.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBut I look over, and walking through the beans is this guy,\u201d Purcell says. \u201cHe was about 150 yards out. I had a silhouette decoy right inside the timber to the right of me, and he was to the left of me. I grunt a few times and he never breaks stride, acts like he doesn\u2019t hear me, and he walks right toward the doe and disappears. But I thought \u2018well, okay, they\u2019re going to make it around the edge of this field and I\u2019ll be ready.\u2019 But all of a sudden, he doesn\u2019t come around the field edge. He shows up on the other side of the trees where I can see him, in a fire lane, and he starts walking straight at me.\u201d<\/p>\n Purcell waits until the buck is behind a tree to draw her bow.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSo I\u2019m at full draw, and he steps into this gap at 15 yards, but he\u2019s looking right at me,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m concentrating, not looking at his antlers, just waiting until he takes a few more steps before I can get a good shot. He looks at the decoy, takes a few more steps and stops, and I shoot him at 15 yards and it just whacks. It knocks him down, and he turns around and runs back into the pollinator plot where I can\u2019t see him.\u201d<\/p>\n Purcell immediately called her husband, Jeff, a retired Missouri game warden. They found some blood in the fading light, but couldn\u2019t pick up a trail. Purcell worried that she\u2019d hit the buck too far back. Eventually, after much searching, the pair decided it was best to avoid potentially bumping him and wait for daylight to start looking again. Purcell struggled to sleep.<\/p>\n The next day, family friends Terry and Debbie Hoyt drove down to help them look. After combing acre after acre, eventually Purcell made her way down to a creek where she thought the buck might have bedded. As soon as she looked over near the creek, she saw him lying there.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI screamed \u2018I found him! I found him!\u2019 and everyone came running over,\u201d Purcell says. \u201cOur friend turns to Jeff and says, \u2018She completely undersold her description of this deer.\u2019 There was certainly no ground shrinkage.\u201d<\/p>\n The buck was much bigger than Purcell had thought from a distance. He had just under 50 inches of mass and a total beam length of 50 inches. His inside spread only measured 16 inches, but there was no two ways about it: this buck was huge.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFrom all the angles I saw him, he didn\u2019t strike me as that big of a buck,\u201d Purcell says of her hunt. \u201cBut oh my gosh, what a trophy.\u201d<\/p>\n The buck ended up having 18 scorable points and green scored 194 1\/8 inches. Purcell is getting a shoulder mount done by Hoyt Taxidermy<\/a> in Brookfield, Missouri.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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