Jakob Begley was crestfallen when the whitetail at the top of his wish list would come no closer than 70 yards the one day he actually saw the animal in 2019. But when their paths crossed again a year later, distance wasn’t an obstacle.
The deer of his dreams was either living on or passing through a relative’s farm in Fayette County, two hours from his Manchester home. He learned about it through trail camera photographs, the first taken a month and a half after the ’19 bow season had opened.
The day he saw the animal on the hoof, he was bowhunting a hollow between soybean fields. The buck was in the beans, well beyond range, and daylight was short.
He never saw it again that year.
The following season, after hitting but not recovering a buck on a Madison County tract, Jakob returned to the Fayette County farm where he’d seen the deer in the beans. Although it was well into the season, he hung a trail camera.
To his delight, the distinctive and much improved buck was among the first photos. And he got a real close look at the deer two days later.
The rifle season was in that day, and Jakob had chosen a stand about 500 yards from where he’d encountered the buck the previous year.
“A few minutes after I settled in, the big buck came out of a thicket about 40 yards to my right and looked around the field. It also saw me. I reached for the gun, but it was stuck on the hanger,” he told Dale Weddle, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine.
Eventually, he freed the .270 before the whitetail connected the dots, and the animal dropped at the shot.
Jakob knew the deer was special, but the trail cam images had not done justice to the 24-point rack festooned with stickers and burr points.
The irregular points contributed nearly 54 inches to the bruiser’s Buckmasters score of 214 1/8.
— Read Recent Blog! Trading Three Cartridges for Wall Art! With a Buckmasters score of 202 6/8 inches, Adam Wood’s 18-pointer is the second-largest, rifle-taken whitetail known to come out of Monroe County, Kentucky.