Kansas’s Fort Riley is well-known for growing some of the giant bucks that have made the state famous. Putting your tag on one is no easy task, however, and no one knows that better than Chris Sykes, a military veteran who has hunted the base many times. “My buddies and I have learned that the really big deer are rarely where most hunters set up, which is in the timber,” he told F&S. “The buck I shot on November 14 was no different. I'd glassed him often, and he’d lay up in some grassy or brushy cover only 15 yards from the road. People would drive by and never even know he was there.”
Sykes first learned about the buck three seasons ago, when the deer started showing up on his cameras. Despite having several pics, the hunter never laid eyes on the buck until last year. “I had a couple different encounters with him last fall, but I just couldn’t seal the deal,” Sykes said. “Fortunately, I was able to get on him again this year, and I kept track of him when he was in spots I could hunt. (Some areas of the base are off-limits to hunting.) The night before I shot him, I watched him cross the road with two does and head into an area I knew pretty well. I decided to go in there in the morning, hang a set, and see if I could get close to him.”
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Sykes was a little late getting into his stand the next day, but it didn't matter. After a couple hours of waiting, he spotted the giant trailing two does about 80 yards away. “I threw everything at him—grunts, snort-wheezes, rattling—but he wasn’t leaving those girls,” Sykes said. “I gave it about a half hour and decided to get out of the stand and go after him. I’d watched the deer disappear into an area of grass and cedars, and I slipped in there, grunting softly as I walked. Finally I saw the does, only 20 yards away, and eventually the buck. He was making a scrape by a cedar, and I had gotten between him and the does.”
Sykes grunted at the buck and got an almost-instant reaction. “I guess he thought another buck had moved in on his does, and he didn’t like that one bit,” Sykes said. “He walked toward me and stopped at 25 yards. He was slightly quartering-to, but I had a good shot and took it. The arrow hit hard, and he trotted out in the grass a bit and just stood there, then slowly walked off. I was a little worried about the hit, so I backed out of there, waited several hours, and came back with some friends and a tracking dog. We found the buck only 80 yards from where I’d last seen him.”
The towering main-frame 10-point has 10-inch brow tines, 13-inch G2s , 11- and 12-inch G3s, and 9- and 7-½-inch G4s, plus 25-inch main beams. “He’d put on a ton of growth since last year, and we gross scored him at 197-4/8 inches B&C,” Sykes said. “I’m convinced that glassing to monitor his movements and a willingness to get on the ground helped me kill that buck. My buddies have each killed bucks scoring over 200 inches on Riley, and neither of them was in a stand at the time. We’ve learned that sometimes you have to do things different than others in order to be successful.”
