Jess and Matt Weber will never know if it was the squirrel dumplings, wild-turkey soup or a flurry of midafternoon trail-cam photos that put Jess in position to arrow a huge 10-point buck near Lake Geneva in southeastern Wisconsin.
Or maybe Jess should just credit her husband for letting her hunt while he watched their three youngsters the afternoon of Oct. 26, 2021.
Then again, maybe she just outmaneuvered him by hiding his release while gathering her own gear and heading out, forcing him to babysit their kids, then 1, 3 and 6.
Such is the challenge of pinpointing the many factors that must align to waylay a specific buck after hunting it for six years. If you demand full truths and certainties in such stories, you don’t understand the quirky realities of hunting Wisconsin’s deer woods.
Still, some details can be measured. Jess Weber’s buck carried a 10-point main-frame rack that measured 21-6/8 inches between the beams. Its left brow tine was forked and measured 6-2/8 inches, and a drop tine on its right beam measured 6 inches.
Matt Weber used the Boone and Crockett Club’s scoring system to measure the antlers at 182-2/8 inches, which could put the buck in the B&C’s record book. Still, Matt doubts they’ll get the rack officially scored because those details simply don’t interest his wife.
The Webers, who moved from Lake Geneva to Cascade, Idaho, in 2023, started hunting the buck in 2016 when they estimated it was 3 or 4 years old. The buck carried an impressive 8-point rack that year. Judging by trail-cam photos on their property and a neighbor’s land, they estimated its antlers that year scored about 160 inches.
Neither they nor their neighbor, who also bowhunts, got a chance at the buck in 2016. They didn’t recognize the buck the next year when it grew a 10-point rack covered in sticker points and “insane junk.”
“Something wrong must have happened to him that winter or spring, because his antlers (in 2017) had weird stuff growing everywhere,” Matt said. “It was crazy. We didn’t think it was the same buck until we talked to our neighbor and studied a lot of trail-cam photos. Our neighbor got a chance at him that year, but didn’t get him. We didn’t see the buck much that year until it started showing up on our food plots in January and February (2018).”
The buck again grew a clean, enormous 8-point rack that summer, minus all the oddities of its 2017 antlers. Matt nearly got a shot at the buck in 2018 after pulling his bow to full draw, but the buck never presented a clear shot. The buck, which they nicknamed “Rambo,” survived the hunting seasons, and again grew clean, impressive 8-point racks in 2019 and 2020.
In November 2020, the Webers both nearly got shots at the buck the same day. “The rut was on,” Matt said. “He blew right past me while looking for does, and ran into the marsh toward Jess. He blew right past her, too, and went into a thicket on private land. We didn’t think he’d stay there long if he didn’t find anything in the bedding area. The rest of that property is pretty much a dead zone.”
Sure enough, an hour later, Jess saw the buck returning.
“He came straight at me to about 10 yards and then turned,” she said. “I would’ve had a broadside shot, but he was behind a bush. When he was about a step from clearing the bush, he looked right at me, turned, and walked straight away without giving me a good shot.”
The buck recrossed the marsh, heading toward Matt. “I saw (antler) tines coming at me above the grass and brush, and thought he was on a trail 40 yards from my treestand,” Matt said. “But he was actually on a trail 30 yards away. When I stopped him to shoot, he looked right at me. When I released, he ducked and my arrow flew way over his back.”
Until then, the Webers had been hunting a 130-acre farm while building a friendship with an elderly neighbor who owned the farm where the buck often bedded. The woman let Matt take his oldest daughter squirrel hunting on her property, but let another group hunt the land’s deer.
To express their gratitude, Matt and his daughter brought the woman homemade wild-turkey soup, along with meals of squirrel and dumplings. “She thought that was awesome,” Matt said. “We also learned the other hunters had trashed her place. The next year, she said we could bowhunt there instead of them.”
In October 2021, the Webers hunted elk for the first time in Colorado during the rifle season. After Matt shot a cow elk on Oct. 20, they drove into Montrose to wash their truck. As their cell phones reconnected to their Wisconsin trailcams, photos of “Rambo” started lighting up their screens. Several photos showed the buck leaving its bedding area around 3:15 p.m.
“We got photos of him fairly consistently the previous three years, but now he was showing up fairly often in daylight,” Matt said.
After returning home, daylight photos of the buck kept downloading. “I wanted to hunt him, but Jess was seeing the same photos on her phone,” Matt said. “When she saw me getting ready to go on Oct. 26, she said, ‘You’re not hunting today.’ She went hunting, and I went to get the kids at school.”
When Jess reached her treestand on the neighbor’s property, she knew she had a perfect wind if the buck came her way from its bedding area. Still, she felt discouraged when the buck didn’t show up on schedule with their trail-cam photos.
Soon after, Matt pulled into their driveway with the kids, and heard his cell phone chime.
“Shot him!” Jess said.
“You did not!” Matt replied.
She wasn’t lying. The buck walked behind her stand, rustling leaves while feeding on acorns. As it quartered away at 17 yards, Jess stopped it and released her arrow. Almost instantly, she started second-guessing everything about her shot, even though it felt, looked and sounded good.
She need not have worried. They found the buck 140 yards away. Her arrow punctured both lungs, clipped the top of the heart, and sliced the liver on the far side.
No bowhunter could nitpick such precision.
