Mark Lunsford's wife, Teresa, was the first to see it.
It was Sept. 9, 2015. He was behind the wheel, and she was in the passenger's seat when the wide-racked whitetail stepped out of some soybeans and into an alfalfa field.
"Oh, my Lord, look what a deer," she exclaimed.
Mark slammed on the brakes and quickly backed up to get a better look at the monstrous whitetail, which was on property adjacent to 200 acres he could actually hunt!
"The buck's antlers were already boned out," Mark told Dale Weddle, who is writing the story for Rack magazine. "There wasn't a bit of velvet left on them. When I saw the size of that rack, I liked to have died."
That very weekend, Mark set up a new trail camera. A week later, he had a photograph of the dream buck.
"It was around the first of October before I finally got a day off (from building houses) to hunt," Mark said. "I probably bowhunted another five or six times and hunted Sunday of the early muzzleloading weekend, but saw only one doe that day."
He admits he was worried a car had hit the deer, or maybe someone else had shot it. But then he retrieved another photo around Nov. 7.
A frost blanketed the landscape on the Thursday prior to Kentucky's rifle opener. Mark guessed correctly there would be an uptick in deer activity.
He credits a buck roar call for sealing the deal, for luring the distinctive buck to inside 30 yards. It took three times to convince the deer to come that close. A fourth roar anchored it so Mark could make the shot.
Recovery seven hours later required two coup-de-grace arrows through the rib cage, but that only adds to the story.
As if Mark's 13-pointer isn't distinctive enough, the animal also has about a 12-inch mane on the back of its neck, a throwback to another whitetail era. Its BTR composite score is 207 5/8 inches.
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