After four seasons of playing cat-and-mouse, Ben Spencer finally caught up to the big Kansas typical buck that had been haunting him. “I honestly felt like he was messing with me half the time,” the hunter told Field & Stream. “I had so many encounters and close calls that I kinda lost count.” The buck ran out of luck last month on November 30, and Spencer was finally able to hang a tag on the Coffey County monster, which would end up gross-scoring just shy of 200 inches B&C.
Spencer and a friend who hunts an adjacent property had thousands of trail-cam pics of the buck since he first learned about the deer four seasons ago. “I have complete sets of his sheds for the last two years, as well as singles from the two years before that,” he said. Spencer also encountered the buck several times while hunting him, including twice in the 2022 season and once last fall when he was walking to one of his stands and bumped the buck at only 5 yards. “I decided to back out that day, not wanting to bump him again,” he recalled. “And, of course, he walked right in front of a trail camera near my stand three times that afternoon. It was getting kind of crazy.”
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But the buck made a mistake this fall when it appeared on a camera near one of Spencer’s favorite spots. “It was a stand I hung in 2021, and I always thought it was my best location on the farm,” he said. “But I rarely got a pic of that buck in that area, so I didn’t hunt it much.” That changed in a hurry this November. Spencer put out another camera even closer to his stand and almost immediately started capturing pics of the buck. “I felt that if I waited for an East wind to hunt the spot, I’d have a great chance to finally kill that deer,” he said. “I checked the forecast and saw that I would get that wind on November 30, so I made a plan to hunt the spot.”
Sure enough, Spencer climbed into his stand that day and before long was watching a doe and a spike buck mill nearby when he spotted the giant buck walking toward him. The buck paused to eat acorns under an oak, while keeping an eye on the deer near Spencer’s stand. The spike harassed the doe for a while but eventually gave up and walked toward the bigger buck, which gave the giant a chance to home in on the doe. “He started grunting like crazy and made a beeline for that doe,” Spencer said. “Suddenly, he was in my shooting lane at 23 yards and I had a clear shot. The hit looked good, and the buck stopped after a 30-yard run, then trotted down to a creek, stopped again, then ran out of sight. I climbed down, checked my arrow and found an immediate blood trail. Then I called my brother, my dad, and my wife.”
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The four found the giant buck after a 160-yard tracking job, and Spencer’s four-year quest was finally over. “I was overcome by a rush of emotions,” he recalled. “There were many times over the years when I thought I would never get a chance at this buck. I’m only 32 years old, but I know I’ll never hunt another deer like him.” Spencer will wait for the 60-day drying period required by B&C to get an official score, but in the meantime two veteran scorers measured the buck and came up with 195-6/8” and 197” green gross scores. The massive, main-frame 10-point has a 21-inch inside spread and 25- and 26-⅞-inch main beams. Spencer says the buck has a good chance of placing in the top five archery bucks killed in the state.
