William Cantillon hadn't been in his deer stand an hour on Dec. 5, 2015, when he saw a peculiar buck that gave him brain-freeze.
"I'd hunted that same spot in Jackson County, Kansas, for at least 15 years, and I'd never seen anything like it," said the 31-year-old from St. Marys. "When the deer came out, I was thinking Why does it look like that? Why is its body so little?"
Only after the cartoonish whitetail approached another buck did William realize how wrong he was. It completely dwarfed the other deer in the bean field. The antlers had fooled him.
"At that point, I knew it was big," he said.
William was hunting his grandfather's small farm, from a blind he'd originally set up when he was in high school. More shooting house than blind, he built it on a flatbed trailer and hauled it to the property.
Constructed of plywood and 2x4s, it has a shingled roof and contains a table and two chairs. The outside is painted a homemade camouflage pattern with green, black and tan paint.
William missed opening day of the Kansas rifle season because he got tied up with working cattle at the feedlot. He also missed the second day. The third evening was his first chance to hunt.
He had planned to wait until his 8-year-old son, Cody, was out of school, so he could take him. But Cody had basketball practice.
Almost reluctantly, William went by himself to the old blind, which requires about a three-quarter-mile hike. It sits in the brush on the high side of a hill overlooking a soybean field.
He jumped a doe en route.
"I was already running a little bit late, so I didn't feel good about jumping that doe," he said. "Next, to make matters worse, I stepped on a covey of quail about 100 yards from the blind. And then, as I was stepping into the blind, crows started hollering at me.
"I just thought it was going to be a waste of time, that I wasn't going to see anything," he said.
"I was on the phone, texting my wife, when I looked up and saw this buck probably 100 yards away and coming directly at me," he said. "All I could tell was that its rack was very wide and very tall."
Make that cartoonishly wide and tall.
William snapped out of his daze soon after the buck neared a 6-pointer already in the beans. As soon as he realized the new top-heavy arrival was not a deformed whitetail, he shot it.
Its BTR composite score is 199 1/8 inches.
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