“I told him I thought it was a shoulder shot, and he was very reassuring, and told me we’d find him. He told me not even to start the 4-wheeler and just walk back up to the house and he’d meet me in a half-hour and we’d give the deer a couple of hours and try to find him.”

During the conversation, Matt was trying to ascertain the size of the buck that his sister had shot. “I told him I was pretty sure it wasn’t that big 8, but I think it would score about 156,” she said. “I had no clue where I picked 156 out of the blue.”

Gathering her gear, she climbed down, not confident in what she would find. She crossed the fence and had taken just a couple of steps into the cornfield when she saw her prize lying at the edge of the field only 40 yards away.

“I called Matt and said to come because he’s down,” she said. “He said, ‘Well, don’t go over there yet’ -- because we kind of have this thing: We go look for them together.”

A bit shaken -- enough so that she nocked another arrow, just in case the buck needed a second shot -- Paula sat down. “It sounds kind of dumb now, but I thought, ‘Man, if he gets up I’m letting him have it,’” she recalled.

Matt and his wife arrived, and the trio walked up to the deer. “I told Matt I didn’t think he was quite 156,” Paula offered. “And he said, “That’s a good deer! His antlers are halfway up the corn stalks!’ And then I realized it was a huge buck.”

It wasn’t long before the magnitude of it all became evident to Paula, whose initial reaction was relief that that she’d made a clean kill with her latest buck. When they started putting a tape to her buck, Matt was decidedly excited.

“I hunt more for the fun of it,” Paula said. “Antlers seem to mean a little more to Matt, because he knows more about them. In some ways, I wish Matt would have taken it instead of me, because it means more to him than it does to me.”

The huge 10-pointer has main beams of 29 0/8 and 28 5/8 inches, brow tines of just over 7 and 8 inches, coupled with G-2s exceeding 14 inches. Those measurements make the rack truly memorable. The buck’s gross score is 195 6/8 inches; it nets 187 2/8 typical by the Boone and Crockett scoring system.

Matt knew that he had his work cut out for him if he was ever going to shoot a deer larger than the one his sister had killed. He enjoys the lengthy bow season, and finds hunting the rut appealing, but a buck bigger than his sister’s didn’t show up in 2005. However, the buck that Matt took during the 2006 rut would have special meaning to both siblings.

Matt doesn’t get too excited about the opening few weeks of the Kansas season, but he admits that once October starts winding down, he starts gearing up. “I probably go five or six times a week starting the last week in October through the first two weeks in November,” said the 32-year-old.

While Matt has killed some nice bucks over the years, he really only wants to shoot a mature animal each year. And the monstrous 8-pointer he shot last season was not only plenty mature, but also one his family was familiar with.

“We called him ‘Long Tines,’” Matt said of the buck that he and his sister had been hunting -- the one they had seen several times in pictures from trail cameras.