2023 - Final day, final hour...

November 7, 2023 • Voyageur Press

Hunting alongside his father, Jordan Moser, Ryker had seen little action during Minnesota’s youth deer season. As daylight began to fade on the final evening, his patience was wearing thin.

“The sun was going down, and I was bored and half asleep,” Ryker recalled. “My dad says, ‘Don’t move. I think I heard something.’”

Ryker had another thought “Probably a blue jay again.”

This time, it wasn’t. A large buck stepped out into the bean field about 200 yards away.

“He started curving his way to us, and my dad told me to shoot whenever I was ready,” Ryker said. “I shot two seconds later and hit him right through the heart.”

The buck dropped where it stood.

Ryker immediately called his mom, Sara, to share the good news.

“My mom was racing me to get that buck, but I beat her because of the youth season,” he joked.

The 10-point buck weighed an impressive 257 pounds — “without the guts and stuff,” Ryker was quick to point out.

Getting the massive deer out of the woods proved to be nearly as memorable as the hunt itself.

“We got some help from our friend Lee Hietalati,” Ryker said. “It was an exercise for both of them. It was hard to get it into the Ranger and then from the Ranger to the truck box. It was heavy.”

“This is true,” Jordan agreed. “It took everything we had to get him in the Ranger.”

Ryker’s buck is now the biggest ever taken by the family. Jordan previously held that distinction after shooting a 236-pound, 11-point buck in 2010. The mount from that deer hangs on the living room wall. Ryker pointed to another spot on the wall where he expects his own trophy to eventually hang. “When we went to the taxidermist, the buck was hanging in the freezer with a bunch of cows, and I wasn’t able to tell what was what,” he said with a laugh. “That buck was as big as a cow.”

The Mosers actually knew the big buck was in the area before the youth hunt began, thanks to a trail camera they had put up about two weeks earlier.

According to Jordan, this fall was the first time they had seen the deer.

“We spotted a 9-pointer, this 10-pointer, and then there was a fork, a spike and a 6-pointer,” Ryker said.

“There were at least nine different bucks on the camera,” Jordan added. “The funny part is that we did not have one daylight photo of the big one. He was active, but all at night.”

Although plenty of deer appeared on the trail camera, sightings from the stand were a different story. "It was the last day, and the only buck we saw during the four days,” Ryker said.

“We figured out where he was living and hoped he would step out,” Jordan added. “We knew he was a big-bodied deer.”



Fortunately for Ryker, the buck did step out — during.