On January 8, hunter Morgan Glander of Cascade, Wisconsin put her tag on an absolute beast of a whitetail she’d been chasing with her boyfriend Ben Rentmeester for the better part of the 2023-24 season. The buck had 13 scorable points and an incredible amount of mass—thanks to its thickly palmated rack. According to Glander’s taxidermist, who’s doing a shoulder mount for her, the behemoth green-scored at a whopping 195 inches B&C.
Glander tells F&S that she killed the buck on a 120-acre farm in Sheboygan County, in the east-central part of the state. “I’m kind of new to this area,” she says. “Back in the summertime I started knocking on doors and asking for permission. I got a lot of no’s. The property that I ended up shooting him on was one of only two yes’s that I got.”
Glander got her first picture of the buck on August 17. “His horns were very blurry in that initial photo,” she recalls. “I couldn’t really make out just how big he was, or how many points he had, and that’s why I ended up naming him mystery.”
An In-Person Appearance
After its initial August appearance, the giant buck completely disappeared from Glander’s and Rentmeester’s cell cameras. They didn’t get their second photo of the deer until the night of November 18, the opening day of Wisconsin’s gun season.
Mystery kept popping up on camera after that, Glander says, but she didn’t see him in-person until the tail end of an evening doe-only hunt in late November. “I was hunting with Ben that day, and we had four deer come out at around 4:45 p.m.,” she says. “One of them looked ginormous. We pulled the scope up on him, and, sure enough, it was Mystery.”
The site of the massive deer through her scope at last light was enough to keep Glander hunting hard all the way through the rut and well into late-archery season. Then, on Jan. 8, it all paid off. “The night of the 8th, I went out right after work,” says Glander. “At 4:22, there was a squirrel that was making a ton of racket that I thought was a deer, then five does trickled out into the soybeans followed by two bucks. All the sudden, I see one of Mysteries palmated beams coming toward me from the west. I grabbed my bow and my rangefinder. That’s when I realized how many eyes I had on my and started shaking.”
Persistence Pays Off
Somehow, Glander managed to keep her composure. With the big buck broadside at just 32 yards, she maneuvered her peep site away from a stick that was obstructing her site picture and let the arrow fly. Her Luminox disappeared into the buck’s vitals, and it ran about 25 yards before crashing into the brush within sight of her tree stand.
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“Right when I got to the edge of the woods, I saw the blood trail, and then I saw his rack sticking up,” she says. “It all happened so fast, and it didn’t even begin to sink it at all until I was standing right next to him. I immediately started crying.”
Glander credits the success to her late father, who mentored her as beginning hunter. “I prayed to him on my way to the stand that night,” she recalls. “I just asked him: If for some odd reason, Mystery would come out tonight and give me a shot, just please help me make it a lethal shot. And he definitely did, so I can definitely thank him for that.”
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