Bradley Poynter of Cave City, Kentucky, made the most of a timely cold front to kill an opening-day buck that set a new Buckmasters record for the biggest nontypical ever taken with a traditional bow in the Bluegrass State. Poynter shot the 182-2/8-inch 19-pointer near sunset on September 7 after witnessing a sight that’s exceedingly rare for Kentucky: an opening day sparring match.
Poynter had been keeping tabs on the buck for three years on his trail cameras. The first year, the whitetail wasn't big enough to tempt him, he told Field & Stream. “But last year, I hunted him hard until he disappeared the second week of September. When he came back in late October, he'd broken off one whole side of his rack. So he got a pass.”
This year, the buck started popping up on Poynter’s cameras in July, sporting an extra 15 inches of horn. By August, he was appearing regularly. “Anytime there was a south wind, he wouldn’t show up until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., but when there was a north wind, he’d show up 20 minutes before dark—pretty consistently. Then it got really hot about two weeks before the opener, and he kind of disappeared. Finally, three or four days before the opener, he got consistent again, and then I got lucky and got that north wind and a 20-degree temperature drop on the first day of the bow season.”
Poynter’s stand is in a corner formed by two roads, which makes it easy to slip in quietly. He had a buddy drop him off only 20 yards from his stand, and he followed a fence row to his tree, which overlooks an oak flat that has plenty of acorns and is crisscrossed by half a dozen trails.
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"Deer typically funnel out of a holler behind the stand, through the flat, and into a hayfield. But for some reason, on this particular evening, the buck crossed in front of me, which worked out pretty good,” Poynter said. “I’m watching him as he gets about 15 yards from me, and he kind of postures and looks out into the hayfield. I look over and see another deer that I’m after.” The second buck was a 150-class 10-pointer. “They met about 10 yards from me and just clashed. Then they both ran out into the field, and I was like, ‘Well, there goes my only chance this afternoon.’”
The missed opportunity wasn’t all that disappointing, Poynter said, because the encounter was so unique. Kentucky has one of the earliest archery openers in the country, so bucks are typically still in velvet when the season kicks off. “I thought it was really neat when they fought. That's the earliest I've ever seen two deer actually hit that hard. My heart was about in my throat, and I really couldn't think.”
To his surprise, the 19-pointer headed back toward his stand. “He turned around and came right back down the same trail and gave me a nice 10-yard quartering-away shot. He mule-kicked at the shot. I was probably 14 feet up in that spot, and it felt like I could grab him. He about kicked the stand out of the tree!”
The buck went only 30 yards before piling up. Poynter was so rattled that when he tried to call his buddy, he dropped his cell phone, climbed down to retrieve it, and then got back in his stand. “Then I thought, Why’d I do that? He’s laying right there. That’s when it hit me. I had to sit down and wait for my buddy to come.”
Buckmasters scorer Hunter Schmittou measured the rack at 180 2/8 inches. The main beams taped out at 25 7/8 inches and 25 inches, with an inside spread of 17 4/8 inches. Most impressive, to Poynter, were the mass measurements, which started at 5 inches on the left antler and 4 5/8 on the right. The right beam lost only 3/8 inches of mass from the first circumference measurement to the last. “He's not super tall, but he's got way more mass than we thought,” Poynter says. “His beams held their mass all the way out.”
Poynter, who is 40, began hunting at 10. He started using a traditional bow 12 years ago and has hunted deer with it pretty much exclusively for the last three. He practices with a recurve year-round and estimates his practice shots number in the thousands annually. “I shoot every day,” he says. “This ain’t something you can pick up a week before the season. Practice is key.”
The heightened experience has been well worth the extra work, he says. “If you've ever known the feeling going from being a gun hunter to a bow hunter, it's like that all over again. I mean, yes, it's a challenge, but you're going to learn how to get in closer to deer. I mean, pretty much my life revolves around a 30-yard circle around a tree. So there's going to be a lot of cat and mouse and learning.”
And when the time comes to pounce, there’s no feeling like taking a record-book buck the old-school way. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thrill,” Poynter says. “No way I’ll be able to top this.”
