Teenager's First Bow Buck is a Heavy NoDak Trophy

Gabe Ricter took this outstanding buck with his bow a few days into the North Dakota season. Photo courtesy of Gabe Ricter.

Gabe Ricter is the first person in his family to take up bowhunting. Unlike many beginning bowhunters, Ricter had his heart set on taking a big buck during his first season, which was 2022. That fall, he pursued a 4x4 buck with a split brow tine, but he didn’t fill his tag. Determined to redeem himself in 2023, he shot a doe on opening night. In hindsight, he regretted it because he had a 6x6 buck on his trail camera.

Ricter’s buddy, who doesn’t bowhunt, graciously allows him to bowhunt on some prime whitetail habitat. With some good bucks around, Ricter committed to giving the 2024 season his best effort. “I haven’t had a rifle tag in three years, so I was determined to give it all I had this year,” he explained. “The unit I was hunting allows baiting on private land, so I put out some corn. A week later, I hung a trail camera.”

DON’T MISS: Crossbow Hunter Shoots Huge Buck with Overlapping Main Beams

Immediately, his trail camera captured a nice 4x4 buck, a couple of smaller bucks and a few does. Eventually, he caught a picture of an outstanding buck that visited the bait site at about 3 one morning.

The buck was a regular on Ricter’s trail camera. Photo courtesy of Gabe Ricter.

“Both of the bucks daylighted about three or four times consecutively on the afternoons leading up to my hunt,” he said. “But I didn’t get to hunt on the opener or the two days after because I dry-fired my bow. It was a dumb mistake. It seemed to be working fine, but I wasn’t comfortable hunting with it before having it looked over by a professional. An archery shop in Minot looked it over. I shot it the following afternoon about an hour before I wanted to go hunting, and it was shooting a foot low.

“I didn’t get too worked up,” he continued. “I got it sighted in at 10 and 20 yards. Since my bait pile is about 15 yards away from my stand, I figured that 20 yards was plenty.”

After driving 40 minutes to the property he hunts, Ricter decided to park a little bit farther from his stand than usual. “I didn’t want my vehicle to spook anything, so I parked about three-fourths of a mile away. I had a bottle of Scent Killer, and I was a little bit skeptical because I had never used it before. But the wind direction was bad, so I sprayed down with the Scent Killer and rubbed mud all over my boots. On my walk to the stand, I blew out a doe that was bedded just along the trail to my stand.”

Check Out Our Latest Camo Pattern: Realtree APX

In between Ricter’s stand and his corn pile is a creek. When he reached his stand location, he was startled to see that the area had flooded. “I waded through shin-deep water to reach my stand,” Ricter said. “I got into my stand, and I immediately noticed that the corn was nearly gone. A bunch of raccoons had come in the previous evening and eaten most of it. The winds were gusting up to 30 mph. I was up in my ladder stand getting blown around. The wind was also blowing right at the corn.”

Other than a coyote, which curled up in a ball and slept 180 yards away, the evening was rather slow. “I sat there thinking that the afternoon was just not adding up to be very good,” Ricter said. “During the last 30 minutes of daylight, I spotted a deer more than 600 yards away. Then, I noticed that a skinny 3-by-4 buck was running over a hill and coming to my corn. He ate for about 10 minutes. Since I had never taken a buck with my bow, he started looking bigger and bigger by the minute, but he wasn’t the best buck on my trail camera.”

As the buck left, Ricter worried that it would smell him. Fortunately, it moved away and disappeared into a draw behind the stand. “I started kicking myself for passing up that buck,” he lamented. “But then I heard water splashing. I glanced to the left and noticed a big buck standing 40 yards away and looking at me. I froze with my bow on my lap. He started walking out into a field away from me, and then he turned right and walked up a hill across from me, which put him about eye level with my tree stand. He stopped, and I was sure he was going to bust me, but then he beelined straight to the corn.”

With heavy antler bases and a drooping brisket, the buck was obviously fully mature. Photo courtesy of Gabe Ricter.

The buck presented a broadside shot at exactly 16.2 yards, as Ricter recalled from using his rangefinder. When he reached full draw, he said that he actually felt his heartbeat in his toes.

DON’T MISS: Video Shows Coyote Climbing 30-Foot Tree to Chase a Bobcat

“I aimed and let her fly,” he explained. “My arrow hit the spine. The buck dropped down and then tipped over. I nocked another arrow and shot him again. I knew he was dead, but I quietly climbed down and backed out to the vehicle to charge my phone. I drove to town and picked up a friend, and we went back out there and put my tag on the buck. We loaded him up and took him around to show the landowner, my friends, and my family. I previously killed one buck with a rifle, and it scored 123 inches. It was nothing like this one.”

Ricter shared that he shoots a 55-pound budget bow, which proves that it doesn’t take a fancy or expensive bow to kill a big buck. He finished by saying that the one downside to killing a 157-inch deer as his first bow buck is that his standards are now “way too high.”