The alarm on Kyle’s phone went off at 3:17 a.m. in his Lincoln Park apartment, the one with the lake view he never looked at because he was always staring at on Google maps. He was thirty-four, divorced once, and had spent the last five years telling everyone back in Chicago that he was “basically a country boy now” because he owned a pair of Sitka pants and a Tundra with Wisconsin plates. People from Illinois who hunt in Wisconsin are called FIBs by the locals (Fucking Illinois Bastards), and Kyle wore the insult like a badge of honor he didn’t understand. He crossed the border before dawn, sipping a large Dunkin’ iced coffee with extra extra, and made it to the public land in Juneau County just as the sky turned the color of a Bears away jersey. This was opening morning of Wisconsin gun-deer season, and Kyle had drawn a rare any-deer tag after five years of applying. He told his group chat it was “destiny.” They sent back vomiting emojis. He climbed into his hang-on stand with the grace of a man who’d watched too many MeatEater episodes but never actually practiced climbing with a rifle slung. By 6:45 the woods were alive with shots echoing like fireworks in the distance. Kyle sat perfectly still, which for him meant checking his phone every four minutes. At 7:12 he saw movement. Two hundred yards out, walking a logging road like it owned the county, was the biggest deer he’d ever seen in his life. Massive rack, thick neck, swagger that said I file my own taxes. Kyle’s heart jackhammered. He raised the Browning BAR his dad bought him for graduation (the one he’d shot exactly 47 rounds through, all at a range in Des Plaines). The crosshairs wobbled like a drunk on the Blue Line, but the buck stopped broadside, staring straight at him. Kyle exhaled, squeezed, and the rifle cracked. The animal dropped like someone cut its strings. Kyle waited the mandatory thirty seconds (he’d read that on a forum) then practically fell out of the tree scrambling down. He ran through the frosty grass screaming “Let’s gooooo!” loud enough to scare every squirrel in three sections. When he got to the logging road he stopped dead. It wasn’t a whitetail. It was a goddamn Texas longhorn steer. Black and white, horns spanning five feet tip-to-tip, with a yellow ear tag that read “Property of Rocking R Ranch – Do Not Harvest.” The bullet had entered right behind the shoulder. Clean kill. The longhorn lay there looking mildly annoyed, like it had been late for a meeting. Kyle stood in silence for a full minute, then whispered, “Well… shit.” He took a picture (of course he did) and sent it to the group chat with the caption “Scored.” The replies came instantly: - “Bro that’s a cow.” - “That’s not even a deer.” - “You shot cattle???? LMAOOOOOO” - “Welcome to Wisconsin, FIB.” Ten minutes later a side-by-side came screaming down the logging road. An old man in Carhartt and a blaze-orange Vietnam vet hat jumped out holding a thermos like a grenade. “You the Illinois boy shot my bull?” he yelled. Kyle raised both hands. “Sir, in my defense, it had horns and it was brown.” The farmer looked at the dead longhorn, looked at Kyle’s Illinois plates, looked back at the longhorn. “That there was El Jefe. Raised him from a bottle. He escaped the pasture three days ago. Worth about eight grand.” Kyle’s face went the color of 2% milk. The farmer sighed, took a long pull from the thermos (spiked coffee, heavy on the spiked), and said, “Tell you what, city boy. You help me drag him out, quarter him up, and get him in the truck, I won’t call the DNR. Meat’s yours. Consider it your first buck.” Kyle spent the next six hours learning how to field-dress something the size of a Subaru. By noon he was covered in blood, smelling like a slaughterhouse, and grinning ear to ear because the farmer had started calling him “Tex.” That night back in Lincoln Park, Kyle hung a set of longhorns above his fireplace. His buddies came over for the Bears game and stared in horror. “Dude, you can’t mount a cow.” Kyle cracked a Spotted Cow (he only drank Wisconsin beer now) and smiled. “Guys… that’s not a cow. That’s my first buck.” And in the northern woods of Wisconsin, the locals still tell the story of the FIB who mistook a longhorn for a ten-pointer and somehow came out of it with free beef and a legend nobody believes. But the horns are real. And they’re spectacular.