Edgar girl ‘fills the freezer’ with trophy 15-point buck
BY KEVIN O’BRIEN
TRIBUNE PHONOGRAPH
When walking into the Edgar Family Restaurant recently, 15-year-old Ashlynn Baeseman is greeted by an older lady who calls her by an interesting title.
“Hello deer-slayer,” the lady says as Ashlynn smiles. “I still can’t believe you got that big deer.”
“That big deer” she’s referring to is 15-point buck Ashlynn landed while on a hunting trip at Little Lakes Memories in Irma on Oct. 22. The excursion was arranged by members of Central Wisconsin Fin, Fur and Feather (CWF3), who organize a similar trip every year for a worthy hunter. Little Lakes Memories is run by people who make special accommodations for hunters who need them.
Aaron Baesemen, Ashlynn’s father, said his family is really into hunting, and every other member had bagged a buck before his daughter got a chance to get one. With a Boone and Crocket score of 178 and 7/8 inches and a mass measurement of 60 inches, her buck is now the undisputed record-holder among the family members.
“I don’t know if anyone will get a buck as big as yours,” he tells his daughter.
Dead Deer Don’t Lie, a hunting group the Baesemans belong to, has a record book going back to 1989, and now Ashlynn’s buck is at the top of the list.
Ashlynn, who is legally blind due to a rare birth defect called Peters plus anomaly, smiles brightly whenever she or her dad talks about the monster buck she took down with two squeezes of her finger. She was assisted by a camera mounted on the scope of her gun, a 6.5 Creedmoor rifle, and helped by her father, who provided verbal directions.
“I can tell her which direction to go -left, right, up, down -- and then I tell her when she’s on the animal and she can shoot,” he said.
A video of the moment she gets the kill shot was posted on CWF3’s Facebook page, and has been viewed more than 2,700 times so far.
Eric Totzke, president of CWF3, reached out to Aaron Baeseman after seeing a video on Facebook of the father and daughter practicing her shooting earlier this year. Totzke offered them a chance to hunt for a trophy deer hunt in the fall.
“I asked Ashlynn and she was super fired up about it,” Aaron said.
After Ashlynn was picked for the trip, they visited Little Lakes Memories in September so the staff could meet with her and she could get a sense of what the place is like. The short day trip really stoked Ashlynn’s enthusiasm as the hunting weekend got closer.
“I was going to fill the freezer,” she said, referring to all the venison she planned on bringing home to her family.
She certainly accomplished that goal. The buck she got produced 30 pounds of sausage meet, 10 packages of steaks, and six to eight packages of back straps, according to her father. Aaron said his family consumes a lot of venison, so it’s nice to have a freezer full of meat ready to eat.
“We don’t buy much beef,” he said. “We probably eat three to four, sometimes five deer a year.”
Even though his daughter’s hunting opportunities are limited by her lack of sight, Aaron does everything he can to include her in the family’s outdoor activities.
“Every night her and I go look for deer, and even though she can’t see them, I tell her and she keeps a tab,” he said. “So, we have a record book of what day it was and how many bucks and does we saw.”
Aaron also brings Ashlynn along when he goes hunting, but this was her first chance to do it herself.
On the day of the hunt, Ashlynn and Aaron were joined by a guide, Ashlynn’s 10-year-old brother, Mac, and J.C. Stubbe, a CWF3 board member who recorded the whole experience. They were all tucked inside a deer blind on the ground situated near a feeding pile.
The trophy whitetail that Ashlynn eventually harvested was already at the bait pile when the group first arrived and started setting up. The hulking animal immediately left the area.
“Of course, I thought we blew it,” Aaron said, laughing. “Normally a buck like that is not going to come back.”
Fortunately for Ashlynn, the buck was hungry and came back into sight about five minutes later. Ashlynn was carrying her little brother’s bolt-action rifle, which required some finagling in order to mount the camera properly on the scope.
