After 25 years of deer hunting Luke Perzee of Danforth, Illinois, tagged the buck of a lifetime this fall. Pezee, who works for an electric company, was hunting farm country in Iroquois County, south of Chicago on the Indiana state line.
“I’ve been watching this buck for a couple years and would see him in the same places in a one-mile square of corn and soybeans,” Perzee tells Outdoor Life. “I’d seen the buck four times this year, mostly with my family while driving around farms and glassing for deer.”
Usually, he spotted the buck in standing corn or tall grass. There were deep ditches full of tangled cover and brush, but no nearby trees to hang a stand. So Perzee, normally a dedicated compound bowhunter, borrowed a friend’s crossbow for the potentially tricky conditions of stalking standing corn.
Perzee was stalking those ditch edges and corn on Oct. 15 when he spotted the buck but couldn’t connect. On Oct. 17, he drove farm roads glassing for the buck until late morning, but never spotted him. So at 11 a.m., he parked and started slipping through rows of corn where he’d previously seen the buck.
“I’d slip along 20 feet, stop and glass and look for deer,” says Perzee, 40. “Then move along again slowly.”
He hunted that way for 2 hours and never spotted a deer. The conditions, he says, were ideal for stalking corn: the weather was sunny and mild, with a 10 mph wind that helped conceal his noise and movement.
“I finally spotted [a buck] 75 yards away, bedded in some CRP on the edge of the corn,” Perzee says. “I could only see a few inches of his antler tops, so I wasn’t quite sure it was the big buck I wanted.”
The buck was alert, looking around and eyeing his surroundings. Over the next 30 minutes, Perzee crept closer inching closer to the buck until he was just 20 yards away.
“I sat down and put my crossbow on a corn stalk as a rest. Then I grunted a couple times. It felt like forever, but after [the last] grunt he stood up and turned broadside. I aimed and shot.”
The arrow passed completely through the rib cage. The buck jumped, then walked 40 yards, licking his side, before falling over dead a few seconds later.
“I just couldn’t believe what just happened,” Perzee says. “I phoned my wife then my brother. Then I called my 19-year-old nephew C.J. Perzee and told him I needed help loading up a giant buck I’d just shot.”
“When I met him, [C.J.] joked, ‘What’s the matter old man, can’t you load that deer alone?’” Perzee said. “But when C.J. saw the buck he yelled, ‘Holy crap!’”
The two loaded the buck and drove it home to show his wife, Megan, and their daughters, Karleigh and Kyrah.
“They were all with me and had seen that buck so many times. It was a real family celebration when they could finally put their hands on that deer.”
Read Next: The Best Crossbows, Tested and Reviewed
A processor weighed the field-dressed buck at 205 pounds and estimated it was 5.5 years old. His taxidermist green-scored it at 195 3/8s inches with 16 points.
“I borrowed my friend Alex Hubert’s crossbow, and I can’t thank him enough for letting me use it,” Perzee says. “This whole thing has been just amazing. I’m so very fortunate for this buck and everything to do with it.”
