It was bitterly cold on the Jan. 9, and only five truckloads of Hatchapaloo Hunting Club members had shown up for a morning dog hunt. The hunters were riding the more than 30 miles of roads on the 7,000-acre Smith County lease looking for a likely place to release their dogs.
“We were just riding and trying to stay in the truck because it was so cold,” joked Gary Kennedy, known at the camp as “Festus Hagen.”
Kennedy was in a truck on one side of a large cutover, while brother George was a quarter mile away on the other side of the thicket. And George Kennedy was feeling terrible, so he pulled over, hurried out of his truck and bent to vomit.
When he looked up, he was astounded at the animal that was no more than 5 feet away.
“This deer crossed the road,” Gary Kennedy explained. “When (George) raised his head, he was looking at (a buck) point blank.”
It wasn’t just any buck: A mass of calcium unlike anything the man had seen on the lease was stacked atop the deer’s head.
Of course, the animal quickly made it across the road and into the thicket while George Kennedy gaped. He quickly grabbed his radio and called his brother.
“I pulled up on this road and was watching the cutover and gas line, when my brother called on the radio and got to telling me there was a big buck heading my way,” Gary Kennedy said.
The 56-year-old hunter snatched up his .30-06, climbed out of the truck and attempted to get atop the dog boxes in the truck bed for a higher vantage.
“The dog boxes were iced up, and I slipped and fell off,” Gary Kennedy said. “Luckily, I landed on my feet.”
So he rushed back to his open truck door just about the time he caught a glimpse of a buck move through an opening and behind some bushes about 150 yards out.
Kennedy cranked his scope up as high as it would go, and peered at the bushes in an attempt to pick up the buck.
“My son (David) was drinking coffee and eating cookies, and he decided he had to get out and take a whiz,” Kennedy said.
That movement was all it took to spook the buck, and it burst from concealment in a full run.
“All I seen was a deer with horns,” Kennedy said. “That booger broke out running wide open, and there I had my scope on 12 power.”
He couldn’t pick up anything in the scope, but he fortunately uses see-through mounts and dropped his eye to line up the iron sites.
His first shot missed, as did a second. The deer was still stretched out in a dead run 150 to 160 yards away, but it finally turned to quartered away from the frantic hunter. That proved to be its undoing.
“By pure luck, I hit him with the third shot,” Kennedy admitted.
The animal went down like a sack of rocks, but it was a little unclear exactly where in the thick growth it was when the shot connected. So Kennedy pulled one dog out of the box and turned it loose.
“I knew he fell, but we didn’t find any blood,” he explained.
By this time, he had been joined by friend Jimmy Kennedy (no relation), who hit the cutover and began searching.
“We went 25 to 30 yards further up, and (Jimmy Kennedy) looked up and said, ‘There’s your deer,’” Gary Kennedy said.
The next words out of Jimmy Kennedy’s mouth, after his eyes settled on the buck’s rack, can’t be repeated in print. His expletive can be excused, given what he was looking at.
Click here to see other photos of this monster deer.
The deer wasn’t large in body size, weighing only 160 pounds. But obviously all of the nutrition the deer picked up the preceding summer went to antler growth.
Thirteen main-frame points, supplemented by 9 scoreable stickers, were arrayed around main beams that enveloped 17 ½ inches of air.
“When I seen it laying on the ground, I knew it was a good deer,” Gary Kennedy said. “Everything was just standing up so tall.”
But he honestly didn’t realize just how special the animal was until the buck was back at the camp and someone started taping it out.
The rack has been green scored as high as 193 2/8 Boone & Crockett.
“I got my picture took more than (President) Obama,” Kennedy laughed.
While Kennedy was thrilled to have killed the big animal, he said it hasn’t transformed his perspective on deer hunting.
“We go to hunt and have a good time, and if we kill a good deer, fine,” he said. “We’re just deer hunting.”
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