“Using my binoculars, I thought, ‘That’s a pretty good buck.’ The buck closed the distance to me, trotting, and turned almost broadside. “Early morning I watched a deer jump over the fence onto the property I had permission to hunt and start walking toward me,” O’Bryan reports. Just at first light, I watched two deer in my Leupold binoculars ( walk under my tree stand, but I didn’t have enough light to determine whether they were bucks or does.” O’Bryan felt very confident he could make a 400-yard shot and had his rifle sighted in at 3-1/2 inches high at 100 yards to shoot dead-on at 300 yards. I still put a lawn chair in my truck, drove to the property and sat in the lawn chair in a little ditch with no trees around me and grass about 2-feet high about 400 yards from where I hoped to see the Emperor. “On November 12, 2016, I didn’t have either one. To hunt from his stand, O’Bryan needed a straight north wind or a straight south wind. I knew I’d be excited for Floyd if I couldn’t take the Emperor, and he did.” “Floyd had a relative owning property that also adjoined the 200 acres I hunted. O’Bryan told his wife and Fowler, “I’m not returning to that property but plan to stay away until the peak of the rut during gun season.” O’Bryan had a very good friend named Floyd Alsbach he told too about the Emperor. Gun season in Missouri opened on November 12th. O’Bryan only had 3 days where he had a favorable wind to hunt from his stand. The Missouri bow season opened on September 15, 2016. They prefer to stay in small, secluded spots where no one ever hunts during daylight hours, and they move primarily after dark.”
Over the years, I’ve learned that mature bucks don’t like to live in big timber. Since I’m primarily a bowhunter, I wanted to take the Emperor with my bow on video. “With only one fence line that stretches for about 500 yards, it only holds two trees suitable for a tree stand. “No hunter in his right mind wants to hunt this property, because it’s more than 90-percent agricultural fields,” O’Bryan says. But after 2 weeks, he only had one set of pictures from one camera on one night and never got a daylight picture of the Emperor. O’Bryan left his cameras on the 200 acres, hoping to get more pictures. O’Bryan told his wife, “The Emperor is still alive!”
Two weeks later when O’Bryan checked his cameras, on the first flash card he saw the very first picture was of the Emperor. O’Bryan had to walk through standing soybeans and around the field edges to put out trail cameras and soon was soaking wet with sweat and even had it pooling in his socks and boots. Missouri temperatures hovered between 90-100 degrees, and the humidity was extremely high. At the end of July, 2016, O’Bryan put out seven trail cameras to see if the Emperor ever came to O’Bryan’s 200 acres. “I decided to hunt close to the property line where the Emperor had been living,” O’Bryan mentions. His daughter inherited the property and stopped all hunting there. Then in the summer of 2016, the owner of the Emperor’s home passed away. “In 2015, my friend, Brenton Fowler, showed me a picture of a mid-180-point buck he’d named the Emperor that was living on the adjoining property to the 200 acres I hunt.” So, O’Bryan chose not to hunt close to where Fowler was hunting. “I’m either putting out or checking trail cameras, hunting for sheds, moving stands, planting green fields or scouting every day of the year,” O’Bryan explains. Editor’s Note: Robbie O’Bryan of Marshall, Missouri, hunts 365 days per year on 20-different small properties with the farthest only 15 miles from his home, allowing him to hunt before and after work on these 16-200 acre places.
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