“About then I saw Jimmy, and he asked me what I shot. I replied, ‘You’re not going to believe the deer I just shot -- it’s the biggest dang thing you’ve ever seen. And I can’t begin to thank you enough!’ Of course, Jimmy is pretty reserved, and not much for expressing his emotions. He congratulated me, and we were off to recover the deer.”

When Paul finally walked up to the monster that he’d shot, he was in shock: Its horns were huge. “The boys and I took turns trying to count points,” he said, “but we kept getting distracted and losing count. Honestly, I tried getting my hands completely around the bases and couldn’t. We all just stood there admiring the deer for a good 10 minutes or more. I couldn’t help but think the hunting gods had finally thrown me bone!”

After field-dressing the deer, the group loaded it in the pickup and started home. At the end of the landowner’s driveway, County Conservation Officer Jerry Ratliff, who just happened to be passing by, stopped to check the deer out. Evidently the Iowa Department of Natural Resources had been watching the deer for quite some time. It hadn’t been seen for a couple of weeks, and worries that it might have been poached were rife.

Like most deer of this caliber, Deaton’s kill attracted a lot of attention. From the minute Paul arrived at home, hunters and non-hunters came in droves to see the deer and to congratulate the humble man from Mingo. “The phone rang off the wall the entire afternoon and through the night,” Deaton recalled. “People were stopping by to take pictures; some of them I knew, and others I didn’t. Although I didn’t think about it at the time, if I would have charged just $1 per photo, I’m guessing I would have made an easy $1,000 that day alone. Honestly, I was surprised with how many people actually knew where I lived. I’m not used to that kind of publicity -- and it’s been totally crazy ever since.”

OTHER FACTS
It’s only human nature for people with a vested interest to be tightlipped about a giant deer -- at least until some lucky hunter puts it down, anyway. Such was the case with the Mingo Buck.

Amateur wildlife photographer Gary Hanson, of Newton, had known about the buck’s existence since late October; apparently, a coworker named Trish had told him about a big deer that she’d seen as she went to and from work. Hoping to capture the deer’s image, Hanson asked her to let him know the next time she saw it.

“One rainy evening Trish called to tell me she had just seen a huge deer on her way home from work,” Hanson said. “She said that the deer looked like it was carrying around a pile of brush on his head. I didn’t waste any time loading up my 3-year-old grandson, Krayton, and wife Julie and headed out the door. It was about a 10-mile drive. And by the time I arrived the sun was just going down.