‘Mr. Dean’s’ wild hunting ride

Hunting big game has taken Dean Klute to locations around the world the past few years, but ironically he didn’t grow up hunting and fishing. In fact, the Hampton area cattle feeder says at one time he had as much fun chasing hunters off his land as he does now hunting everything from local deer to South African Kudu. 
“Honestly, I did very little hunting as a young person. I didn’t grow up as a hunter or fisherman and I didn’t start hunting ‘till middle 90s,” Klute said. “How I got started was one time Deryl Hilligas, my good friend, he said, ‘You’ve got to go along with me deer hunting.’ And so I crawled in the backseat of his pickup, and we just rode around. I really always liked my sports, and I was just intrigued by the question of ‘That deer is clear over there, how do you get close to him to get a shot?’ And that kind of got my adrenaline going, just figuring that out. I think I rode with those guys two years and then they let me use a gun. And then I got started just hunting around here and it just grew and grew.
Besides Hilligas, Klute said that original close-knit group of hunters included Gene Joseph, Dane Schafer and Todd Roehrs. 
‘We’ve hunted and fished together, and they really treat me good and take good care of me,” he said, noting that those relationships, as well as the family members who have accompanied him on some of his destination hunts, are some of the best aspects of his hunting experience. 
One of Klute’s first big game hunts to take him out of state was a trip to the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana to hunt elk.
“Deryl went with me and we got a small elk,” he said. “And from there on, I guess it just kind of grew, and then you kind of just get that to where you’re going to shows and it gets in your blood and I think I’ve been on 12 destination hunts and successful in about eight of them.”
The first of his two international hunting trips took him to New Zealand in 2015.

Hunting from a helicopter
Traveling with his wife, Sharon, and daughter Kelsey (Harders), Klute bagged three animals on that trip – a Roosevelt elk, a red stag and a goat-like animal known as a tahr. He says that adventure involved a ride on a helicopter.
“We had to get to the mountains where those things hang out,” he said. “There was the pilot and the guide – and he had the gun – and those two sat in front. And then it was Sharon and me and Kelsey, and another hunter from Canada. They let the Canada guy out first, and he went off and the guide went with him... and then the guide jumped back in and he said, ‘Dean, now it’s your turn.’ And we went quite a ways – we just left that guy there, which I’m wondering what we’re going to do here. And we got close to where he saw this one, and then the helicopter let me down.”
Since the terrain was too rough to actually land the chopper, Klute said the pilot just hovered about three feet off the ground so that he could jump out. 
“He (the guide) just opened door, and he just grabbed me and pulled me out,” he said. 
Klute didn’t have to walk very far to get a shot at the tahr, bringing him down with an 80 to 100-yard shot. But that was when his outback adventure really started. 
Speaking of the guide, he said, “I hadn’t met the guy over eight hours earlier, but he had a dry sense of humor. He said, ‘We’ve got to go back and get the Canada guy. If we don’t come back, you might have to shoot yourselves because nobody knows you’re here,’ and he just left! And he might have been gone a half hour, and we’re just kind of standing there on this little area going, ‘What just happened here?’ But he came back and got us all, and was laughing about the whole thing.”

South African adventure
Klute’s only other international hunting trip took him last March to South Africa where he harvested a cape buffalo, an eland, a sable and a kudu (the last three are antelope species). This time the hunting party included Gene and Karen Joseph and Klute’s son, Kyle. For Gene and Dean, who admit they aren’t the most confident of international travelers, it was the perfect entourage. 
“Karen has traveled a lot and Kyle’s traveled a lot,” he said. “So for Gene and I, it was perfect. Going through airports they had our passports and everything. It was very easy.” 
While the cape buffalo is often said to be the most dangerous animal in South Africa, (“They just hate everybody”) Klute said the most difficult animal to hunt – and perhaps the heaviest – was the eland because they are so skittish of humans. 
“The minute they’d see anybody, they were gone,” he said. 
Although that hunt took place more than 18 months ago, Klute still doesn’t have the mounts back from the taxidermist in Omaha. One critter he does have proudly displayed, however, in a mountain lion he shot on a destination hunting trip to Rifle, Colo.

Getting his big kitty
Staying in the basement of the home of his hunting guide, Klute said the hunt took several days and involved the use of dogs to track and tree the big cat. 
“We’d get up real early in the morning, and we hunted the Bureau of Land Management above the farms, and then we looked for tracks,” he said. “And then if we found tracks, then we turned the dogs loose to see if they could find him. Our first day, we had found tracks but it got warm and we just couldn’t keep on the tracks. And then we went every day, and the last day it just worked out to where we could find that guy. (The guide’s) two favorite dogs are Reba and Miller, and they live with him in the house. But when he started to hunt, when he’d put them on the tracks, he would put the younger ones first, and he’d give them a talk and then send them out, and they would just bark and go. Reba and Miller were his last two dogs, and then he would talk to them and send them out. I asked why, and he said, ‘Well, Reba and Miller will be at the cat first. The other ones are going to screw around.’ And I said, ‘Well, how are we gonna know?’ And he said, ‘You just listen; their bark will change, and it’ll get louder and louder and we’ll know exactly when they’ve got him in the tree.’”
Klute said the dogs took off running through the trees like a herd of buffalo, but, just as the guide had said, from a quarter mile away they could hear the dogs going crazy. 
“I’ve never seen dogs hate something so bad,” Klute said. “And he said, “Dean, we got your kitty.” We walked down there and there he was.”
Klute said the guide told him that while the lion might choose to take on one or two dogs, he wouldn’t want to tangle with eight of them. Klute took his shot and added another trophy to his collection.

‘Shoot, Mr. Dean!’
Another trophy in Klute’s collection is one he brought home from the second of two trips to Florida to hunt alligators a few years ago, and that one is also largely responsible for Klute’s decision to remodel a garage in Hampton into a hunting lodge and well-used event space he calls “The Bullet.”
“I had in my head I was going to get an alligator,” he said. “And the first time Kyle and I went down we hunted in a big vegetable garden there, and stayed with the guy and his wife.”
However, though they hunted for gators that haunt the man’s irrigation canals for several days, the hunt was unsuccessful. 
“We never got a shot, but we spent four or five days down there and saw some really pretty country,” he said. “And then I waited two years longer, and I went to a little different area. I took Kelsey for that trip, my youngest daughter, and it really worked out quite well.”
Going out into the swamps on a mud buggy with his guide who referred to him as “Mr. Dean,” Klute they soon spotted a big gator in the water. 
“He said, “Mr. Dean, there he is!” And we could see his head in this water area. And then he says, ‘Shoot, Mr. Dean!’ I put a shot on him and he said, ‘Run, Mr. Dean,’ because he said, ‘We got him and he’s gonna come back up and you’re gonna put a kill shot on him or he’s gonna go the bottom, and nobody will get him’ And I shot him again, and then he threw a hook with a piece of pipe, and then we pulled him in, and it was just like on TV. They’re just spinning, and they’re mad. And he says ‘Shoot Mr. Dean. Shoot Mr. Dean!’ I shot a lot of times to make sure we got him. That was fun.”
The big lizard was just over 12 feet long and weighed in at perhaps 800 pounds, and, naturally, Klute had the head and front legs mounted and put the display in his office at home where it could be seen from the entryway and the kitchen. “I thought he was cool,” Klute said, however, Sharon was less enthusiastic about having the big reptile in her home. He said they had talked about creating another space where the growing collection of mounted animals could be put on display and when the opportunity came up to purchase what used to be Steve Friesen’s body shop south of the grain elevator in Hampton, Sharon saw it as her chance to get the critter out of her house.
“I don’t care what you do,” she told Dean, “but you just get that thing out of here.” 
And so the trigger was pulled on what was to become “The Bullet.”

The Bullet is born
Saying he never really had an overall plan for turning the former shop into a place to display his collection, store his classic cars and host dozens of community events over the last few years, Klute said The Bullet turned into a sort of community project that “just turned out very nice.” 
Schafer, who in addition to being one of Klute’s hunting buddies is also the local cabinet maker, did the cabinetry and created the back bar and many others pitched in their time and talents to create a comfortable and stylish space. 
One of the more interesting features is the bar itself, which was constructed from wood salvaged from an old bowling alley and which has 7,865 pennies displayed under a coating of resin. Klute said he went to the bank and got $70 worth of pennies in rolls and volunteers started gluing them down one at a time, which took a couple of days. 
Since completing the Bullet in 2016, the Klutes have hosted between 40 and 60 events a year, including family gatherings, reunions, association meetings, graduation parties and more. 
“You know, it used to be 20 or 30 people, and now it’s 40 to 50 and if it gets big, we take the cars out and set up tables,” he said. 
The Bullet is often home to Klute family gatherings, and whether it be for Thanksgiving or Christmas, those events are growing in size as well. Their three children, Kendra (Betz),
Kyle and Kelsey are all married and each has three children. The nine grandchildren range in age from 3 years to a high school sophomore.

Bucket list hunts
After a dozen destination hunts which have contributed to the trophies that line the walls of the Bullet, Klute says there are still some hunts on his list he has yet to complete. 
“I don’t have a moose and I don’t have a bear,” he said. “But I’m 68 years old and the body’s poor, but if I could do those two yet... But if I could get the moose or the bear, they would be dream hunts – and those probably are the most expensive ones, because when you get to Alaska... a lot of people want a moose. A lot of people want the big bear, grizzly bears and stuff. So, I’m kind of hoping that maybe there’s a deal... Somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody. And I’ve got to  find a family member to go along!”