I've been thinking about this trip for almost a decade.

Iowa during the rut is one of those places you hear about your whole life before you ever see it. I grew up watching outdoor TV before and after church, looking at those wide-open Midwest landscapes. Then the more elk and mule deer hunting I did out west, the more I fell in love with country you can actually sit and glass. Iowa was the whitetail version of that for me, and the type of ground I picked to hunt was a big part of the reason for going.

The most common question I got before this trip was about inches. You going to shoot a 150? You looking for a 160? That wasn't what I was after. At this point in my life, I wanted two things: a deer that was a good representation of Iowa, and a deer I could grab my bow for without second-guessing myself. That's the whole measuring stick.

The rest of it was about hunting the way I wanted to. I don't boat into the places I hunt back home, and in most of them you couldn't if you tried. Here I could, so we loaded the boat with two guys and all our gear and ran it in. That was part of the appeal.

That first morning we came up the hill from the water, and I couldn't stop smiling. Does on the hillside acting like a buck was behind them. Thomas spotted a nice 10-point crossing into a timber draw. Turkeys clucking behind us. Both of us looked at each other and said we could sit there for the entire two weeks and be fine with it.

So that's what we did. Almost five full days in the same tree. 30 mph winds, wind chill in the single digits, and the two of us sitting up there grinning at each other anyway.

Just after 2:00 one afternoon, an absolute magnum came through, and I couldn't do a thing about him. I grunted, I snort wheezed, I rattled, and the wind ate all of it. He hit that bedding area, bumped the does out, checked every one of them, and was on his way to the next bedding area in under 10 minutes. That's what a mature buck does. It also lit a fire under both of us, because it told us we were in the right tree.

I've preached patience during the rut for years, and it still doesn't matter how much I say it; it's hard to do. But the playbook felt like a solid one, and my gut said keep sticking it out. So we did.

Then he showed up. Tall tines, big body, white antlers, coming in dominant. A big, mature 8-point, and exactly the deer I described before the trip ever started. The one that didn't make me question grabbing my bow.

Fooling a deer like that into bow range is the top of my hierarchy of experiences. Five days of sitting still is what it took.

This is On My Terms.

In partnership with Maven and Timber Ninja Outdoors. Filmed by Thomas Clements, Rockin C Media.