Big Buck Central

Ryan Sullivan: 188 7/8
Back
Weapon Category BTR
Score
Number
Of Points
Inside Spread Location Date
Compound Irregular 214 1/8 9 | 11 25 2/8 Mississippi Co., AR 11/15/13

Highslide JS
Ryan Sullivan Buck
By Larry Jones

Twenty-year-old Ryan Sullivan is not a typical frat boy. As an agriculture business major at Arkansas State University, his life’s course load is pretty full. Yet he somehow manages to find time to pursue his passion for deer hunting, which has many of his fraternity brothers scratching their heads.

When he first saw the buck in this story back in 2010, Ryan knew that, if given time, it would grow into a world-class deer. And he was right.

He saw the deer once in 2011 and again in 2012, and it was substantially bigger each season.

The buck almost met its maker in 2011.

“I had hunted five or six days straight (before the state’s youth season) and hadn’t seen a thing,” Ryan said.

Because deer activity was so slow, he decided to take a break, shift gears and to take his 7-year-old cousin hunting. There’s no way I’ll see that buck, he thought.

Wrong.

When the two were afield, the first deer to show was a 7-pointer, and Ryan told his cousin to get ready. However, the big one was right behind it.

The kid, of course, was plenty happy to see and have a chance at the 7-pointer. Imagine what he was feeling when he spied the giant behind it.

Ryan swallowed hard. He was finally looking at the buck of his dreams, a whitetail he’d spent countless hours pursuing, one he’d already began calling HIS buck. And he had no weapon.

His young cousin had never shot a buck.

What to do?

Being a smart college guy and able to think quickly, he whispered to the youngster: “Dad won’t let us shoot that big buck!”

The boy never questioned it. He shot the 7-pointer.

Ryan now confesses that it was a difficult decision, and he’s endured a lot of ribbing because of it. But he stops short of apologizing.

He never saw the buck again that year, and he saw it only once the following season, though he did collect several nighttime photographs from trail cameras.

By the time the 2013 season arrived, Ryan had become even more obsessed with taking this deer. Tons of pictures revealed its already impressive rack had grown a lot, and he was sure the antlers would surpass 200 inches.

College fraternity life can be very demanding, and at that point in Ryan’s life, social activity normally takes precedence over any other pursuit. His friends continually urged him to stay at college every weekend, but the determined hunter wouldn’t consider it. He was determined to shoot that deer.

His fraternity buddies couldn’t understand why he would place deer hunting above his fraternity activities.

On Nov. 15, after a week of the buck being photographed during the day, while Ryan was in class, he decided to hunt all day. While in his stand that morning, he got a text message from a friend who’d shot a buck at 7:05.

When Ryan looked up from reading the text, he saw a doe right in front of him. Not far behind her was none other than his buck.

The doe browsed in front of Ryan – sometimes as close as 20 yards – for 40 minutes. Her suitor stood behind a tree the whole time.

Ryan feared the buck was going to wind him, because it kept raising its head and sniffing the breeze. So when the doe walked past and the buck moved within 30 yards, Ryan drew his Mathews bow.

The doe saw the movement and bounded off, sounding the alarm. The buck, clueless, froze at 28 yards, quartering away from Ryan’s position. A moment later, it paid the price.

Ryan could easily see the blood trail from 25 feet aloft. With the wisdom of a much older hunter and the patience of few, he immediately called his dad, got down from his tree, and then went home. He knew the value of waiting, and he wanted to give the deer plenty of time.

To avoid thinking about the deer and to soothe the growing knot in his gut, Ryan went out to his duck blind and spent four hours shoring it up with brush.

Before returning to the woods that afternoon, Ryan called a couple of his friends to assist in retrieving his trophy. The trail to the buck covered 150 yards.

“I think my friends thought I would be jumping up and down and hollering, but I was speechless,” he said. “I remember thinking What am I going to do now? I had just reached a goal that I had set four years earlier.”

The sense of accomplishment was overwhelming and bittersweet.

By the time Ryan and his buddies ferried the deer out of the woods and took it home, several more friends had gathered to see the buck.

That celebration wrapped up Ryan’s deer season. Because he felt there could be no cloud higher than the one he was riding, he devoted the rest of the season to hunting ducks.

Editor’s Note: Want to read more tales about the world’s greatest whitetails? Subscribe to Rack magazine by calling 1-800-240-3337.

Copyright 2024 by Buckmasters, Ltd.

Copyright 2020 by Buckmasters, Ltd