After years of waiting and watching the Buck, Wisconsin Bowhunter marks 180-inch Whitetail

Lucas Norby was elk hunting in Colorado in late September when he received a text from his wife, Paige. Her message was to let him know that a buck he had been watching for three years was now moving consistently in the daylight. But if he wanted to hunt it, he’d have to get home to Wisconsin quickly, Paige insisted.

“Paige was going crazy because he was finally moving through an area in daylight where I might have a chance to take him,” says Lucas Outdoor living. “This buck was a stray. He got to the point where I nicknamed him ‘Cowboy’. We would take pictures of him, one to two miles apart. He just wandered off all the time.”

Lucas explains that Paige had been monitoring some cellphone cameras they had placed on a family-owned plot of land near Eau Claire. Lucas had placed a few cameras at his tree stand, which was along a travel corridor he thought the buck was using. But the only photos they got of the buck were all late afternoon.

“He roosted at the top of a ridge and only moved from his mooring along the edge of a CRP field to soybeans to feed late in the afternoon,” Lucas explains.

After returning from Colorado, Lucas went hunting to his station for the first time on September 26. Just before dark that evening, he spotted the buck 100 yards away as he moved from the ridge toward the bean field. Three days later, on Sunday, he was back in the same spot, and although he had the win from 45 yards, he never got a chance.

“The next day was warm, so I didn’t hunt. But the next evening a cool front was forecast and on October 1 I was back on the stand,” Lucas explains.

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About 6:00 PM that evening he watched Cowboy come down from his mooring on the ridge and head for the farm fields. The buck fed for a while at 100 yards, then entered the CRP field and walked toward Lucas.

“When he was at 80 feet, I drew my arrow, anchored and released him,” he says. “He was moving and the arrow went in behind his shoulder and went out behind the opposite shoulder.”

The deer took off in high gear as Lucas watched it run across the bean field and disappear into a tangle of foliage. Lucas finally got out of his stand and found a trail of blood. After following it for a while, he decided to quit, go back and return the next morning. By then, Lucas had recruited Paige, along with his father, John, and their neighbor to help find the buck. He also reached out the Deer Society and found someone with a blood-sniffing dog who could help them find the deer.

“That certainly made it all easier. We took the dog to the last blood I had found the night before, and the dog went straight to the buck. He only got about 100 yards before he died.”

Lucas says the buck weighed 253 pounds and was 6.5 years old, according to his taxidermist. Cowboy’s rack had 14 points that could be scored, and they gave it a green score of 186 7/8 inches.

“We put it in our house,” says Lucas. “But we have a lot of stuffed animals there, and a lot of them are Paige’s. So where exactly Cowboy will hang has yet to be determined.”