Making History with Milo Hanson
The buck didn’t look real when it finally stepped out of the willows.
That’s the part Milo Hanson still comes back to. He’d hunted whitetails his entire life—long enough to know the difference between a good deer and something else entirely—but when he saw that rack moving through the snow near Bigger, Saskatchewan, on November 23, 1993, his first thought wasn’t “world record.” It was that the antlers looked too big for the body carrying them.
People around town had been talking about the deer for weeks. A bus driver had seen it from his route and stopped to stare. Others caught glimpses crossing fields or slipping into cover. The descriptions were always the same. Enormous. Heavy. Wide. Someone said it looked like a baby elk, and the name stuck.
Milo didn’t chase the deer alone. He hunted it the way most prairie hunters did then—with friends, on foot, pushing thick cover where deer liked to hide. Saskatchewan whitetail country is a mix of open farmland and tangled willow runs, and big bucks learn quickly how to use those places to disappear. This one was no different. More than once, it slipped around drives and vanished into cover without leaving a clean track to follow.
This account is drawn from an in-depth interview recorded for Big Buck Registry’s Big Buck Podcast, Episode 40, in which Milo Hanson recounts the hunt in his own words.
When fresh snow finally came, the group decided to try again. Milo took a familiar position on the north end of a willow run they’d already walked before. It wasn’t a special stand or a marked spot—just another place he’d stood many times. When the buck broke cover, several shots rang out as it ran. Milo fired and saw hair fly from the animal’s back. The bullet broke apart, sending a fragment into the right antler where it would later be found.
The buck ran again.
On the next push, it came out on Milo’s side. He hit it in the shoulder, and the deer went down. When Milo walked up and saw it was still alive, he finished it with a shot to the neck. That’s when his legs started to shake—not from excitement so much as from the delayed weight of what had just happened.
Up close, the rack made even less sense. There was no ground shrink. No illusion created by distance. The antlers were massive, symmetrical, and carried with a kind of balance that hunters rarely see, even once in a lifetime. Later measurements would show a 29-inch outside spread, 27-inch main beams, and tines stretching past 14 inches. At the time, Milo and his friends just stood there looking at it.
They hung the buck in the shop and skipped lunch that day. Instead of heading back out to hunt, they sat on benches and stared. Nobody talked about Boone and Crockett. Nobody talked about records. Someone joked about winning the local deer pool. That was as far as anyone’s thinking went.
It wasn’t until a friend measured the rack for the local wildlife federation that the tone changed. Either the tape was wrong, or the deer was something nobody around Bigger had ever seen before. When the official scoring finally took place weeks later, it happened in the town’s school auditorium. More than 400 people showed up. Measurements were written by hand on a large sheet of paper taped to the wall, one line at a time. Each number brought applause.
When the final tally came in—213 5/8 inches—there was no debate left. The Hanson buck was the new world-record typical whitetail.
The attention followed quickly. Writers arrived. Jim Zumbo arrived. North American Whitetail and Outdoor Life both wanted the story, and Milo found himself learning, almost overnight, that a hunting story could carry real value. He hadn’t known that before. He would have given it away.
For years afterward, Milo traveled with the mount, appearing at shows and events across North America. Replicas were made. The rack was trademarked. The deer became a measuring stick that hunters everywhere would compare against, year after year.
Eventually, the travel stopped. The phone rang less often. Life settled back into a routine that felt familiar. Milo kept farming. He kept hunting. He still hunts the same land today.
Every time he passes the field where the buck fell, the memory comes back. Not the score. Not the headlines. Just the moment when a deer stepped out of the willows and nothing about it seemed possible.
Milo will tell you the same thing now that he did then: he wasn’t trying to make history. He was just hunting the way he always had, trusting patience, watching the wind, and standing where he’d stood many times before.
That’s usually how the biggest deer stories begin.
Listen to the Original Interview
Milo Hanson tells the full story in his own words on the Big Buck Registry’s Big Buck Podcast (Episode 40).