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When Brent Wiesenburger got down to hunt on Saturday morning, he dressed understanding that he’d be sitting in a floor blind with a conveyable heater, which meant skinny layers and no heavy coat. In any case, consolation was the very last thing on his thoughts. The 52-year-old hunter had been chasing probably the most distinctive whitetail buck he’d ever seen since South Dakota’s archery opener in mid-September. This weekend, he was pulling out all of the stops on a rifle hunt.
It wasn’t only a heavy-beamed typical whitetail, or perhaps a nontypical with additional trash hanging off the edges. This buck had one barely palmated 6-point antler on his proper aspect and what can solely be described as a swollen moose paddle on his left. The buck was so out of the bizarre that Wiesenburger barely advised any of his buddies about it.
“I like sharing footage with all my buddies again residence,” he tells Out of doors Life. “All of us sit collectively throughout opening weekend and share pics and inform tales, however I’ve been so secretive this fall. And so they’re all like ‘Oh Brent, you’ve obtained an enormous one up there, don’t ya?’ And I’ve been like ‘Ehh, he’s not that large, however he’s completely different.’ And so they ask to see an image, and I inform them nope, I can’t do this.”
Wiesenburger began seeing the buck on path digicam this summer season. He manages a property in north-central South Dakota for optimum whitetail looking, and this buck confirmed up for the primary time in early summer season. Wiesenburger’s background in agriculture lends effectively to fastidiously sustaining meals plots, selective reducing in cedar and spruce stands, and usually turning the 600 acres of CRP land right into a deer paradise. (A lot to the thrill of the landowner, an avid upland hen hunter, this work additionally turns the land into pheasant paradise.)
On Nov. 18, he dressed mild and went out to the bottom blind almost two hours earlier than first mild. He turned on his Buddy Heater, which was connected to a 20-pound propane tank.
“The heater sounded humorous, prefer it was burning bizarre. So I turned it off and clicked it again on once more, and it flared up a bit bit. So I turned it off once more, and turned the propane tank off. However I nonetheless heard some hissing. So I made a decision to let it air out, and I began getting my gun prepared and tripod arrange, simply getting located,” Wiesenburger tells Out of doors Life. “Then I reached over and figured, earlier than I turned the propane tank again on, I wished to clear any gasoline that may have been there. I didn’t notice this, however a small propane tank was nonetheless within the heater from final season, and it will need to have nonetheless had some gasoline in it that was leaking out of the valve. Properly, the entire inside the deer blind became an enormous fireball. It blew up.”
Wiesenburger tried to blow the fireplace out, however the Buddy Heater wouldn’t extinguish. He unzipped the deer blind and threw the Buddy Heater exterior. He tried to stomp it out with filth from the sector. When that didn’t work, he fastidiously dragged the contraption right down to a small pond, broke the ice, and tossed it within the water.
“I obtained again to my stand and realized there wouldn’t be a deer inside 500 yards of this blind,” Wiesenburger chuckles. “It nonetheless smells like burnt plastic.”
He lasted till about 45 minutes previous first mild earlier than he began to essentially remorse his selection of clothes for the morning. The temperature had dropped into the excessive teenagers in a single day, and the solar was simply barely up. Wiesenburger determined to make a break for the tower blind throughout the shelter belt, the place he knew he had one other heater—one with no malfunctioning propane tank.
“I wasn’t in there half-hour when this buck and one other got here from the south,” Wiesenburger says. “He stepped into the CRP clearing, 100 yards away. So I shot. It was surreal. I attempted to compose a textual content message to my spouse and I couldn’t even kind, I used to be shaking so dangerous.”
As soon as Wiesenburger may examine the buck’s unusual baseball mitt of an antler, he realized it was affected by small pores and was lighter than it regarded. (The buck did stroll round along with his head tilted left underneath the load, a bent that his taxidermist will likely be replicating within the shoulder mount.) The buck additionally had a big tumor on its chest within the path digicam photographs which had since ruptured, abandoning a ugly wound that was leaking fluid.
Having this buck on the bottom meant that Wiesenburger may lastly ship footage to his pals, which he’d been dying to do since earlier than the season began.
“They had been like ‘The place are you at, we’re coming to search out you,’” he says. “They couldn’t wait to see it both. That made it fairly particular.”
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Wiesenburger’s story proves that in deer looking, even the worst of circumstances can result in spectacular outcomes.
“If that Buddy Heater wouldn’t have blown up, I might have been good and comfy in my floor blind and I wouldn’t have identified that buck was on the opposite aspect of the bushes,” he says. “I wouldn’t have even seen him.”
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