Earlier this month, Illinois bowhunter Evan Morgeson arrowed a whitetail buck with a freakishly large 31-point nontypical rack. Morgeson took the buck during an early morning hunt that he almost abandoned after oversleeping on the morning of October 8, he tells Field & Stream. The deer's unofficial green score came in at more than 230 inches.
Morgeson says he hunts almost exclusively on public land throughout his home state of Illinois, and he documents his adventures on Youtube and Instagram. He located this deer on a piece of public property near home by honing in on terrain features he found while e-scouting. “I saw it for the first time during an observation sit—6 days before I shot it,” he recalls. “I could see that he had a little trash on him during that first outing, but I had no idea how big he really was.”
Unbeknownst to Morgeson at the time, the deer was well known to locals who live and hunt in the area. He says the buck split its time between private ag fields and the adjacent public property. “I found out later that he’d been spotted at least 50 times,” he says. “In the summer, he spent a lot of time out in a bean field next to a highway.”
On October 8, with a cool front moving into the area, Morgeson took off work to hunt the deer. “I ended up waking up an hour late, and I was super rushed getting to the spot,” he says. “I kind of second guessed going at all, but I ended up getting in there right after first light.”
Twenty minutes later, he heard a nearby cattle farmer moving cows from one pasture to another. Then a group of whitetails moved into the area. “Three does came out of that field that the cattle were being driven out of and then a few more showed up,” he says. “They hung around for about 10 minutes, about 30 yards away, then the buck trotted in behind them.”
Morgeson was at full draw before the big nontypical ever stepped into his shooting lane. “I tried to stop him with a grunt, but he didn’t hear it so I yelled at him,” he says. “When he stopped, I hit him center of mass. The shot was a little further back than I wanted, but I could tell it was lethal.”
Morgeson says he was shaking when he called his wife to tell her he’d shot the big buck he was after, then he backed out of the area to give the deer more time to expire. After dropping some of his gear back at his truck, about a mile away, he hiked back in and quickly found blood.
“I found my arrow covered in blood then I saw his white belly sticking out of the phragmite grass,” Morgeson says. “The whole thing was surreal. I can’t believe how quickly it came together after I spotted him the first time on October 2.”
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Later that day, Morgeson hung the deer in a friend’s walk-in cooler next to a local bar where friends and family members gathered to admire the once-in-a-lifetime trophy. He had his brother-in-law tally up the green score, which came in at whopping 232 ⅞ inches. If the score holds, Morgeson’s buck could earn a spot in the top 50 non-typical Illinois whitetails ever entered into the Boone & Crockett record books.
