Illinois bowhunter Marc Anthony isn’t afraid to think outside the box. For starters, Anthony—whom I’ve written about several times in the last few years—doesn’t hunt from a tree stand. He’s a ground-pounder who uses a gillie suit as camouflage, then slips close to some really big deer and shoots them with a bow. In short, he’s not your typical Midwestern bowhunter.

Though Anthony already took a beautiful buck earlier this fall (Illinois residents can tag two bucks with archery gear), he used even more than the usual ingenuity to fill his second tag with this great trophy. “I was hunting in farm country, on a property I’d been saving all fall,” he told me. “There’s very little timber on the spot, just a tiny little piece of property out in the middle of nowhere. But this is where I find big bucks in the aftermath of our gun seasons, which just ended. I think bucks that get pressured in larger tracts of woods head out to these places, where most hunters don’t bother them.”

Anthony, of course, is not “most hunters.” So on a cool morning this week he headed to a patch of cover on his farm-country property, and about 7:00 a.m. a doe walked toward Marc. Right behind her was this monster whitetail, which walked into easy bow range.

Anthony’s successful hunt is a great example for hunters in the region, where gun seasons have ended or are about to. Find those little pockets of cover ignored by other guys, and you could find a great buck conducting business as usual.