With an unfavorable wind and forecast of 65 degrees, Cody Cutler hadn't planned to spend any part of Nov. 14, 2015, in his favorite deer stand.
But when he and a friend began clicking through trail camera images from cards they pulled that morning, they came across a daytime photo of an A-list buck, along with what appeared to be a hot doe. It was, after all, mid-November in Kansas.
Nothing calls for a change of plans like a buck with its guard lowered.
After showering, Cody went to his stand, taking every precaution against breaking a sweat. He was aloft by 2:30, looking at the afternoon's first deer within 15 minutes.
"Eventually, I glimpsed a doe jump the fence about 200 yards away," Cody told Ed Waite, who's writing his story for Rack magazine. "Then another deer jumped the fence. When it turned its head, I saw the long tines and recognized the buck from the trail cam photo."
Identification was pretty easy, considering the deer's extra-long tines and forked P2.
The first time Cody drew his bow, he couldn't hold it, and the deer saw him relax the string. The hunt would've ended there, but the doe led the buck into a thicket, where several other would-be Romeos were lurking.
"I'd never heard so much deer noise, grunting and roaring," Cody said. "It was just crazy! There were seven different bucks pursuing one hot doe."
Several minutes after the whitetail train chugged northward, away from Cody, he saw another lone deer coming back south. Fortunately for him, it was the hot doe. The buck with the split P2 was only seconds behind her.
Cody wound up taking the only shot he thought he'd get, a 55-yarder. The arrow smacked the lovesick buck right where it was meant, and the hunter heard the crash moments after the animal disappeared.
"It sounded just like wind toppling a tree," he said.
Later that day, when Cody pulled the card from the camera next to his stand, there was a photo of the buck taken just seconds before the shot. The next photo was of Cody picking up his arrow.
Cody's buck has a BTR composite score of 220 inches. With its matching 14-inch P2s and foot-long P3s, the rack looks more like double pitchforks.
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