By Rich Miller
It has been a week since I got back from Kansas and I think I am still in shock over the size of the buck that I was lucky enough to kill out there. It’s a good thing you can’t wear a set of antlers out by showing them around if so I would be in bad shape as much as I have hauled them around!
The day I was to leave Kansas, I was on the phone with a good buddy of mine, Ken Cobb, from Hunting The World TV. He said John Kennedy and another hunter, Joe Lamaster, were in Kansas hunting and filming a show, also. They had been with an outfitter for a week and had gotten one good buck on film falling to John’s arrow, but Joe hadn’t had much luck. Ken asked if they could come up and hunt with us a couple of days and hopefully they could fill their other tag. I told him I had to get back home and wouldn’t be there, but Mick said to come on and hunt for a few days.
I left Mick’s on Saturday morning about 4:00am to head home and they arrived around lunchtime and started getting some camera stands put up on some of the places where we already had stands in place. The first afternoon of their hunt they got to see what the area offered because Mick finally got to put his tag on a great buck. The guys were not having much luck the first few days they were there, so they moved to the area where the split G2 buck (that I had hunted the last two years with no luck) was roaming.
They went in Monday afternoon and hung a stand and never saw a deer that evening. I think they were probably starting to wonder if we even had any deer around. Tuesday morning everything changed about 8:30 that morning when John looked up and spotted a buck coming toward out of a pasture to the east. The sun was in his face and Joe couldn’t see the deer. John gave him play-by-play on where and what the deer was doing until he jumped the fence and Joe could see him. When the deer steeped into the shooting lane, he grunted to stop him and the made a perfect 30-yard shot. Now, they knew there was a deer in the area that we had been hunting a few years but they weren’t aware of which deer they had killed until a short tracking job as Mick filled them in. They downed the wary old split G2 buck that we had been after for so long.
The deer was big but he didn’t weigh nearly as much as we thought, but his 156” rack made up for his body weight. Both those guys were thrilled; and to make it even better, that was Joe’s best buck ever. They said the hunt was great as well as the footage that they got. I don’t know for sure but I am think the show will probably air in late summer on the Outdoor Channel on Hunting The World TV. I can’t wait to see it. After all the hours I spent in the stand hunting and never catching a glimpse of him, I will still get to see him die!