John Cassimus actually loves looking mule deer. The Birmingham, Alabama, native grew up with a whitetail obsession that remodeled right into a mule deer obsession when he began looking in Alberta round 2006. So when a nontypical whitetail with muley-esque body weight and big antlers got here trotting towards his treestand within the final 5 minutes of Alberta’s taking pictures mild on Aug. 31, he couldn’t imagine his luck. May this deer be the most effective of each worlds?
One 20-yard spinal shot dropped the buck the place he stood and a follow-up shot completed the job. Cassimus, a 55-year-old Hoyt professional staffer and entrepreneur, had the whitetail of a lifetime on the bottom.
“I despatched Isaac Aleman [of Black Rifle Coffee Company] an image final evening and he goes, ‘man, that’s an superior muley,’ and I’m going, ‘Isaac dude, that’s a whitetail,’ and he was like ‘you’ve acquired to be kidding me,’” Cassimus tells Outside Life.
Cassimus places loads of on-the-ground scouting effort into his Alberta deer hunts, and after tagging a 212-inch mule deer buck there final 12 months, he hoped for a repeat this season. However after placing 2,500 miles on his odometer driving from Alabama to Alberta (say that 5 instances quick) to scout for 12 days, he hadn’t positioned a mule deer that piqued his curiosity. He had additionally set out some cameras for whitetails, which produced a couple of photos of this muley-like buck.
“He wasn’t being actual constant about what he was doing. He could be on one finish of the sector coming in within the night after which the opposite finish and I simply couldn’t get him patterned,” Cassimus says. “So I hunted him twice. The primary time I hunted him, he got here in proper round darkish and it was too late and he was like 300 yards from me, so I didn’t also have a probability.”
By the tip of the week, Cassimus had given up on discovering any mule deer, so he went again to that stand for the ultimate evening sit. The night was virtually over when he lastly referred to as for a experience.
“It was going to take 20 minutes or so for them to get us, so I simply turned to my buddy and we began speaking and it acquired sort of windy. We had been in between some alfalfa and a few peas in a bit of stretch of woods. And I regarded up and these deer had been working by there,” Cassimus recollects. “I don’t know if one thing had spooked them or no matter, however then they jumped the fence. And the following factor , inside like 30 seconds, I’d shot him at 20 yards proper up underneath the tree stand.”
Solely when Cassimus approached the deer did he understand the dimensions of the buck he was working with. And make no mistake: this deer wasn’t simply fats.
“He was simply so massive. He stood the peak of an elk. His decrease leg from the joint down, I’d say is greater than 27 or 28 inches, like simply insanely lengthy. It didn’t even look regular, ?” Cassimus says. “We figured the deer was going to be round 160 to 165 [inches] once we checked out it on digital camera, however then we simply didn’t understand the deer was 300 kilos on the dot and it was so massive and so tall that once we walked as much as him, we had been simply sort of in awe … particularly from the mass standpoint. The deer had over 53 inches of mass.”
Cassimus is a religious mule deer conservationist and avid big-game hunter with a protracted season forward of him. However this whitetail will endlessly stand out. The velvet buck ended up measuring 187 1/4 inches.
“I used to be simply tremendous fortunate,” Cassimus says. “It was fairly superior.”
