Jason Tayor from the town of Cub Run in central Kentucky had been getting trail camera photos of a great buck for four years on land he owns. Over that time he learned the buck’s habits well, as the deer would show on his Hart County property every early October.
“I’d usually see him in summer and September and then he’d start coming to a food plot of mine in early October,” Taylor tells Outdoor Life. “But this year he was more nocturnal, and he was more sporadic in his travels.
“I didn’t see him in September. So my friend Josh Massingill and I decided to go to Wyoming and hunt upland birds for a few days.”
But during the bird hunt Taylor suddenly got cell phone pictures of the big buck at the food plot near his lock-on tree stand back in Kentucky.
“I’d learned that in early October when he showed, he’d consistently hang around for a few days.” says Taylor, age 40. “I knew if I was going to get a chance to take him, I had to get home right away.”
Immediately the pair of hunters left Wyoming and drove straight through to Kentucky. It was an exhausting 21-hour drive.
“We got home and I was dragging, really beat,” Taylor says. “But I took a shower, went right to the woods and got in my tree stand long before daylight. I didn’t want to spook deer going into the spot, so it was over an hour before it started getting light.”
Taylor was hunting hilly Kentucky terrain, and his food plot was on top of a ridge.
Twenty minutes before legal shooting light on October 2, Taylor saw the giant buck 40 yards away in the food plot.
“He worked a scrape on the far field side, then turned and left the field,” Taylor says. “I couldn’t believe it. I really thought it was over for me. But 10 minutes after legal shooting light, he stepped back into the field just 30 yards away.”
The deer stood at a poor shot angle for Taylor, but eventually it turned. At 34 yards, the bowman sent a Rage 2-blade, 100-grain broadhead arrow through the deer’s chest.
He saw the arrow in flight hit the animal and watched the buck fall after it traveled only 40 yards. Taylor was elated and immediately called his hunting brother Nathan and his wife Holly.
“I could barely talk. I was so happy – almost speechless,” he says. “It was only 7:15 a.m., and my wife was still in bed.
“I was teasing her, because she had a chance to take the buck last year when it was about a 150-incher. But she passed it with her bow. She’d have shot that deer this year because he was so much bigger. But she didn’t try to get him because I wanted that buck so bad.”
Jason field dressed his buck at the food plot and loaded it into his truck.
“I thought it would score in the 180s, maybe 190,” Jason says. “But my brother said it’d go 200.”
The non-typical rack green scores 201 3/8-inches, netting 198 inches. The deer is essentially a main frame 10 point, but with 28 non-typical scoring points with a 17 3/8-inch inside spread. Its main beams are 27 inches long, with over 5-inch base circumferences.
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“We processed the meat, and I’m going to have a half body mount of the buck made,” Jason says. “I’m going to display the mount on a bourbon barrel, which is appropriate because this part of Kentucky is famed bourbon country.”
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