Topeka Kansas bow
hunter bags record-setting buck
When it comes to deer
hunting, you can break it down two ways. There's skill and there's luck and if
the two come together it can produce a mighty fine deer.
Brad Henry, Topeka,
doesn't profess to be that skilled a deer hunter but he will be the first to
admit he got lucky this year.
"I've hunted with a
rifle for four or five years and didn't do real good," Henry said.
"Last year, I started hunting with a bow. I didn't do real good last year,
either."
This year when the season
began on Oct. 1, Henry dedicated himself to the pursuit of a big buck.
"Any time off I had,
I was out there," he said. "The place I was hunting, I missed a
10-point buck last week. I figured I had worked the area pretty well."
Fortune in the shape of a
friend, Jeff Frank of Alma, intervened.
Frank, a long-time friend
of Henry, invited him to hunt on grounds west of Topeka. Henry quickly accepted.
The result was a buck of a
lifetime; one that could top the Kansas charts in both the rifle and archery
lists.
"I got into the tree
stand about 9:30 Sunday morning and just stayed there," Henry said. "I
saw a few does but no bucks. Sunday evening I saw a buck outside of the
cornfield I was hunting. I think it got up out of this bedding area about 500
yards away. I first saw it when it was 100 yards off."
Henry said he had been
rattling all day. To the uninitiated, rattling is rubbing and banging a set of
antlers together to simulate a fight between two bucks.
It often draws in bucks
interested in what the two imaginary bucks are fighting over (in most cases a
doe in heat).
"The buck was coming
pretty fast," Henry said. "I was able to get my binocs up and take a
quick look. I saw he was a shooter."
When the buck got within
about 30 yards, Henry raised his bow and shot.
"I hit him in the
throat," he said. "Jeff got over there and we followed the blood trail
for a quarter of a mile. When we found him, I knew he was big but I didn't know
how big."
On Tuesday, Henry took the
rack to Gary Hunsicker, an official scorer for the Pope & Young Club, which
keeps archery records for national and international game animals taken by bow.
"It's a typical
(versus a non-typical) rack," Hunsicker said. "I measured it with a
gross score of 217 1/8 and the green score at 199 2/8."
How big is that? Well, the
biggest buck shot by an archer in Kansas happened in 1994 when Stephen Weilert
arrowed a buck that scored 193 2/8 in Woodson County. The rifle record in Kansas
was taken by Dennis Fienger in Nemaha County in 1974 and scored 198 2/8.
Henry's buck won't become
official until 60 days have passed, a time when the rack might shrink. Hunsicker
doesn't think it will shrink enough to fall below those scores.
The rack is a typical
12-point that Hunsicker says is uniform and perfectly symmetrical. There's more,
though.
"I got in touch with
the Pope & Young Club headquarters Tuesday," Hunsicker said. "This
is going to be the No. 2 whitetail buck ever shot, anywhere, by bow. The record
is a 204 4/8 buck shot in 1965 in Illinois. The previous No. 2 buck was a 197
6/8 buck shot in 1962 in Iowa."
Henry is still stunned by
his good fortune.
"I don't care about
the record book," he said. "I was hunting on property that Jeff's
father hunted. His dad died eight years ago and it was kind of special we killed
it on the land he hunted all those years."