Only minutes before shooting one of the most impressive whitetails to come out of Kansas in 2019, 11-year-old Cayden Harris was fast asleep.
The road-weary kid from Bonifay, Florida, was hunting with his father, Corky, on Dec. 4, the day they arrived. The Harrises, along with a friend, had driven 19 hours straight to reach the Land of Giants.
A friend of Corky’s had invited them to come to southwestern Kansas to hunt deer and pheasants. They’d originally intended to spend the first afternoon hunting birds, but that plan was scrapped because Cayden was on crutches for a busted knee. Plan B was to truck-scout the man’s holdings.
Corky and Cayden drove to a high spot next to a cut wheat field to glass. As the afternoon progressed, the boy fell asleep in the front seat, while dad maintained the watch.
Corky eventually spotted a dozen whitetails on the move nearly a half-mile distant. All does, they were on the neighboring property. When a coyote barked, however, they veered toward his friend’s land.
That’s when Corky woke his son.
“While the deer were slowly moving in our direction, I noticed one doe was looking at something I could not see,” Corky told Ed Waite, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “I thought she was watching the coyote, but then I saw what I thought might be a 140-inch buck.”
When the does jumped the fence onto his host’s wheat field, Corky instructed Cayden to kneel behind the tripod he’d already arranged. He’d forgotten his son couldn’t do that with his bum knee.
When he realized his error, he raised the tripod so Cayden could shoot while standing.
“By then, the does had started moving directly toward us,” Corky said. “The buck was only 50 yards behind the last doe.
“I didn’t have my rangefinder, but when I thought the buck was between 400 and 425 yards from us, I told Cayden to hold directly on the deer’s white throat patch,” he continued.
Corky wanted only to see if his son could hold the rifle steady. Satisfied, he waited until the deer turned broadside before telling Cayden to aim at the deer’s shoulder and to squeeze the trigger when he was ready.
The first shot hit the deer, which hesitated long enough for Cayden to fire three more times.
The long-beamed 8x12 racks up nearly 44 inches in mass. None of the eight measurements fall under 5 inches. It has a Buckmasters score of 229 7/8.
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