Alabama outdoorsman Jake Markris has an uncanny ability of being in the right place at the right time. And on Halloween evening, he was in a lock-on tree stand in the same Missouri oak tree where he’d arrowed a great buck four years earlier.
“It had been hot and rainy late this October, and I was ready to go back home,” Markris, 52, tells Outdoor Life. “The weather was bad, deer activity was awful, and I was leaving for Alabama.”
But a good friend convinced him to stick around the 250-acre farm in Daviess County because a cold front was in the forecast.
“My good buddy Wade Robinson, who works for Drury Outdoors, said ‘No! conditions are gonna be perfect for the next few days in West-Central Missouri – you’ve got to stay and hunt’,” said Markris, of Fairhope. “So, I did, and I’m sure glad.”
When the cold weather swooped into the area on Oct. 30, Markris knew right where he was going to hunt the next evening.
“I’ve hunted that farm for 25 years, and know it very well,” he said. “I hunt it with family and friends for deer and turkeys, and over the years I’ve shot a lot of great bucks there with my bow.”
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Halloween morning was cool and bright, and there was good wind for hunting that afternoon. They were perfect conditions for the spot where Markris hoped to ambush a buck moving from its bedding area to an ag field. He headed there late in the afternoon and walked directly to a line of oak trees on a ridge that bordered a clover field with some standing corn rows. He recognized his tree right away.
“It’s just a great place, right where I shot a 150-inch, 8-pointer four years ago — that was also on Halloween,” Markris says. “I got to the tree about 4:30 p.m. and red oaks were raining acorns. There were two big scrapes near the tree I hung my stand on.”
Markris didn’t think the scrapes had been worked because of the warm and rainy weather the previous few days. He figured if a good buck was nearby, it would show that evening. And just one hour later, Markris looked down the ridge and spotted a buck at 35 yards headed directly toward him.
“I didn’t know how big he was, but I grabbed my bow and got ready as he kept walking toward me,” he recalls. “He walked in a straight line directly to a scrape under me and began pawing it. The he started hitting a licking branch above the scrape with his antlers and nose.”
The buck was directly underneath Markris, and with its head high working the licking branch, it was looking right at him.
“I couldn’t move — he was looking up, and I’m looking down,” Jake said.
The buck finally dropped its head and finished working the scrape, then turned into the timber where it was thick and difficult to thread an arrow through.
“I had one small opening to shoot through the cover, and it was tight,” he says. “But the buck was only 12 yards away, so I drew, anchored and released.”
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The arrow passed through the deer’s heart in a flash, and Jake watched it run and fall just 50 yards away. He immediately called his wife, Shai, to tell her the good news. Then he called a nearby friend who brought his ATV to help haul out the buck.
Markris’ buck has 14 scoreable points, with tremendous antler mass, and the nontypical rack green scored at just over 172 inches. It has a split G2 and triple brow tines on one side.
“When I got my hands on the buck, I realized he was blind in one eye, likely from fighting,” says Jake. “Maybe that’s why he didn’t see me up in my tree stand when he was looking up working the licking branch at the scrape right below me.”
Markris says the buck’s unusual tine off its right side made him think about the odd buck he saw at the same field while turkey hunting there last spring.
“My son Lawson and I were working a gobbler and looked across the field and here walks a buck right to us. I videoed the deer [with my phone] and thought about it after I shot the 14-pointer on Halloween,” he says. “There’s no doubt that’s the same buck, because it had a strange looking beginning antler on that same side.”
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