The Boone & Crockett Club’s all-time record book lists only a handful of whitetail bucks whose racks carried only eight points.
It may take some luck, but a 15-year-old high-school freshman from Greenwood has killed a huge buck that may join them.
Luke Kelly was hunting on a relative’s 300-acre farm in Grenada County on Sunday afternoon when he arrowed an enormous whitetail. On first glance, it looks like an 11-pointer – a 5×5 frame and a 2 ½-inch sticker point on the right antler behind the brow tine.
But put a tape measure on it, and it may very well end up as a typical 8-pointer. One visible point near the end of the right beam doesn’t quite measure an inch, so it’s not scorable, and the corresponding point on the left beam measures barely an inch, so if it shrinks at all during the 60-day drying period required by B&C, it may wind up unscoreable, leaving Kelly with a main-frame 4×4 monster that has been pre-scored by a certified B&C scorer at 179 4/8 points gross and 170 6/8 net.
Tracking the big brute
Hunting from a box blind on the ground next to an old food plot, Kelly arrowed the big buck at 6:45 p.m. on Sunday with a Raven crossbow, bolt and mechanical broadhead. Kelly investigated shortly thereafter, and found the back half of the arrow, stained with the buck’s blood, broken off, on the ground nearby. He found another spot of blood a few feet away, but nothing else. He called his father, Larry Kelly, who helped him look for the buck, “very cautiously,” Larry Kelly said, for about 30 minutes before burning up the telephone lines trying to find someone close by with a tracking dog.
About a half-hour later, Eddie Moorman of Grenada showed up with his tracking dog, Cash, and after another half-hour, Larry Kelly said he heard a bunch of whooping and hollering from the spot where Cash, Moorman and Luke Kelly stood, admiring a whale of a whitetail.
“We had him on trail cameras for 3 years,” Luke Kelly said. “Last year, he was a big 8, but he was a little down from the previous year. This year, he was much bigger. He’d been coming in regularly, about 6:30 every afternoon, to this spot. I hunted him one time before, a week ago, and I saw every other deer around … but he didn’t show.”
The right one
Kelly got into his blind at about 5 p.m. on Sunday, and by 5:45, he had deer all around him. A big 10-point buck walked in, and for a moment, Kelly thought it was the big buck he’d been waiting for – and he was considering shooting it – until the really big buck arrived. It made its way across the food plot, spooking some of the does and moving the other big buck to one edge.
“He was going across, and my range finder quit at 49 yards,” Luke Kelly said. “He was about 10 stops past there, so I put the pin on at 60 (yards) and shot him quartering away.
“I could kind of tell that I hit him; he sort of dropped down, then he ran off. I heard him running through the woods – there were a lot of deer running – but I never heard him fall. So I called my dad, then I walked out to see if I could find any blood. The arrow was there, broken in half – I didn’t know if it shattered on his shoulder. It was on the ground, and there was some blood on it. There was one other spot about 2 yards away.”
Larry Kelly arrived soon thereafter, put in a half-hour looking, then started calling and came up with Moorman, who arrived with Cash and put an end to the search.
A popular buck
It didn’t take long for the deer-hunting community to weigh in on the big buck, which carried 26 ½-inch main beams, 11 ½-inch brow tines, and four other tines pushing or exceeding 12 inches, plus a 19 ¼-inch inside spread.
“We thought we were the only ones hunting him, but everybody in the area was,” Luke Kelly said. “A bunch of people had pictures of him. We think he was either 8 ½ or 9 ½ years old, because there were pictures of him all the way back to when he was 3.
“When he was 6 ½, he was huge, then at 7 ½, he was down a little. This year, he was as big as he’d ever gotten.”
Larry Kelly said the broadhead and the forward half of the crossbow bolt were still lodged inside the buck, which had apparently survived being wounded many years ago. He said one local hunter said he’d put a bullet through the buck – a high shoulder shot – that the buck survived, with the wound healed over.
Looking at trail camera photos of the buck through the years, Larry Kelly identified the buck the year it had been shot and said the next year, the buck carried a drop tine and a couple of sticker points – perhaps a response to the wounding – that weren’t present on the rest of the racks it grew in more recent years.
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