The hunters couldn’t find blood at first, but then they found a good trail, and presently came on the buck piled up in a brushtop, still alive, but barely -- and fulfilling Cori’s prophecy that her husband would again “look the buck in the eye.” They quickly administered the coup de grâce.

The left side of the buck’s rack was noticeably larger than the right, which had fooled both hunters into thinking that the 125-inch buck was more like a 140-incher. “When we got the buck, I wasn’t sure at first it was the deer I had shot,” Dillon said. “I’d thought he was bigger.

“When we flipped him over, there was a hole in his back. The fur had healed over, but there was still a leathery-looking spot there. The hunt was over.”

Back at the skinning shed, the knife hit metal as they were removing the buck’s tenderloins. After a bit of impromptu surgery they found Dillon’s G5 Montec broadhead and 6 inches of his arrow embedded in the flesh. That definitely eliminated all doubt about the identity of the whitetail.

“The buck was 3 1/2 years old,” Dillon noted. “The average 3 1/2-year-old at our club will weigh 200 pounds. This buck had lost 50 pounds from being injured and running does during the rut.”

Dillon characterized the kill as an “answered prayer” -- especially since he got to share with his cousin and best friend the moment in which the buck that he thought he’d lost was recovered. “The Lord allowed us to finish the game,” he asserted.

As it happens, the landowner and club leader at first started to admonish the cousins somewhat sternly, because the buck wasn’t quite up to normal club standards. But after hearing their incredible story, he decided to let it slide.

The club’s rules aren’t based on a set of specific measurements, or on anything else so concrete; they just try to kill big-bodied mature deer. “We look at the age more than the antlers,” Dillon admitted.

“B.A. is a real hunter,” he added. “He knows how to read the wind and put himself in the right place at the right time -- and that’s what he was doing when he got this buck.” He went on to say that his cousin also shoots his .270 Winchester with deadeye accuracy, and was able to make a difficult shot on a running target to drop the buck.

On the other hand, Dillon didn’t kill a buck last season -- mostly because he became very choosy after first arrowing and then losing the buck. The season before, however, he did better, starting off by taking an old gnarly 6-pointer that weighed an almost unbelievable 245 pounds and then following up by dropping a 14-point non-typical on club property -- a rifle kill that gross-scored 157 1/8 B&C points.

Daniel had seen the big 14-pointer the season before. He homed in on the spot to hunt the deer during off-season scouting. Their property is on so-called “prairie” land with lots of fallow Conservation Reserve Program weedfields.