Steven Lynn of Junction City, Kentucky, spends more time harvesting beans and cutting hay than he sets aside for hunting whitetails. I'm not sure how the 33-year-old farmer fared with the former in 2014, but he sure collected a bumper crop of antlers.
Steven didn't know that when he squeezed the trigger, however. He thought he'd shot the big 10-pointer on his wish list.
That whitetail is probably still alive and kicking.
Steven rents, farms and hunts 630 acres in Lincoln County (south-central Kentucky). The tract is cropland except for a couple of wooded creeks, and he has a stand in a hackberry tree near their intersection.
"When gun season finally arrived, I got up early, ate breakfast, grabbed my .243 and headed for the stand," Steven told Dale Weddle, who wrote the story for Rack magazine. "I live only about 2 miles from the farm."
Soon after daylight, he spotted a 7-pointer feeding in a nearby alfalfa field. About 7:30, three more bucks passed underneath his stand to join it.
"I had put a wick up with some Tink's #69 on it, and I could tell the bucks smelled it. They put their noses up and would take a few steps and sniff the air in the direction of where I had placed the scent. But they kept moving into the alfalfa field," he said.
Before long, three more small bucks came into the field from different directions.
About 9:00, Steven saw this buck hop a fence and enter a bean field about 300 yards distant. He looked at it through his scope and decided it must be the big 10-pointer he'd been hoping to see in his sights.
The buck eventually came to within 40 yards, which is where it died.
As soon as Steven crossed and reached the far creek bank, he realized there were more than five points on the visible side of the rack. It actually had seven points on each normal antler, not counting the third antler arising from a separate pedicle on the left side.
The 15-pointer has a BTR composite score of 207 1/8 inches. It's No. 3 among Kentucky's Semi-irregulars felled by rifle.