Rack Magazine

Arkansas naysayer has a little crow to go along with his venison.

When Chris Cypert saw the 2016 trail camera photograph of a buck with an extra beam, reportedly within 30 miles of his home in Searcy, Arkansas, he refused to take it seriously.

He’d seen plenty of big buck photographs passed around from phone to phone, shared on Facebook, and exchanged by email. The ones purportedly from Arkansas usually weren’t.

This story had a longer shelf life, however.

“I heard the rumors,” said the 40-year-old fireman. “I still thought it was a hoax.”

He’d find out later it wasn’t.

On Sunday morning, Nov. 27, Chris leaned over in the church pew and asked his cousin, Jake, if he wanted to join him for an afternoon deer hunt.

“Jake was waffling. When we left church, he was 50-50,” Chris said. “I told him I’d check back later in the day.”

That afternoon, Chris sent Jake a text: Are you going hunting? He considered the lack of a response as a no.

Around 2:00, Chris and his girlfriend, Cindy, drove 25 miles to hunt near his grandmother’s place. He decided to go to the setup closest to her house, which meant parking behind the barn and walking to a box stand he’d shared with his 13-year-old daughter two weeks earlier.

The shooting house is elevated, about 14 feet off the ground. There’s barely enough room for two people.

The stand overlooks a drip (irrigation) line in former rice and soybean fields that have been replanted and placed in the wetlands reserve program. The lane was converted to a food plot: turnips, five rows wide.

A willow brake is between the lane and a levee. Chris could see 158 yards to his right and 275 to the left.

“For some reason, I was just thinking that day, Man, 275 yards … You know how you get in a spot and start calculating ranges, how you pick up your gun and point it where you might see a deer? You think, I can shoot in that direction comfortably,” he said.

“I wanted to be prepared. Wanted to be ready, to know I could make a kill shot,” he added.

Chris has a ballistics app on his phone that shows bullet drop. He’d tapped it and was looking for the screen he wanted, when a doe appeared at the far — 275-yard — end of the lane. When he scoped her, he lost a little confidence in shooting that far.

He thinks the app recommended he hold 3 inches high. He ultimately decided not to think about it unless a buck took the stage.

About 15 or 20 minutes after the first doe arrived, another one entered the plot at the 150-yard mark.

“When I looked at her through the scope, I thought, That’s more like it,” he said. “That was cutting the distance in half. I could do that with one hand tied behind my back, so to speak.”

Even though a 150-yard shot was a no-brainer, Chris decided to see what his phone app recommended. Just then, about 10 minutes after 4:00, a third deer was coming out at between 40 and 50 yards.

“I was looking at the app when I felt a tap on my arm,” he said. “Cindy said, ‘There it is!’

"My adrenalin went almost to the point of blackout, so I don’t remember what happened. I thought I was a wreck, but Cindy says I calmly picked my gun up, pointed it out the window, aimed and shot. That quick,” Chris said.

He believes his first shot hit the buck and the second flew wide. A third squeeze of his .270’s trigger knocked the animal off its feet.

“I was going to keep shooting until it was down,” Chris said.

“When we got out of the box stand, I was trembling,” he said. “I told Cindy ‘I can’t stop shaking!’”

When he got his land legs under him, Chris almost ran to the downed buck. He was 10 yards away from it when he realized it was far bigger than he’d thought.

“I said ‘Whoa,’ and she asked, ‘What’s wrong? Is it trying to get away?’ I said ‘No, he’s done. This is real. This really just happened. This is crazy. It’s a GIANT of a deer,’” he continued.

Chris texted a photo of the buck lying in the field to his cousin, and Jake met him at his home.

The whitetail might have worn a world-class rack, but it was smaller than average in body.

“It was really run down. Probably weighed between 175 and 180 pounds on the hoof, down from what was surely 200 before the rut,” he said.

This article was published in the Jan/Feb 2018 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.

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