When Chris Cypert saw the 2016 trail camera photograph of a buck with an extra beam, said to have been taken within 30 miles of his home in Searcy, Arkansas, he refused to take it seriously.
He'd seen plenty of big buck pictures passed around from phone to phone, shared on Facebook, and exchanged by email. The ones purportedly from Arkansas usually weren't.
This story had a longer shelf life, however.
"I heard the rumors," said the 40-year-old fireman. "I still thought it was a hoax."
He found out on Nov. 27 that it wasn't.
That Sunday afternoon, Chris and his girlfriend, Cindy, drove 25 miles to sit in an elevated shooting house near his grandmother's place. The stand overlooks a narrow food plot on a former drip (irrigation) line.
They could see 158 yards to the right and 275 to the left.
Chris was playing with a ballistics app on his cell phone when he felt a tap on his arm. Three does had already come to feed, and Cindy had seen a large buck on the closest doe's backtrail.
"My adrenalin went almost to the point of blackout, so I don't remember what happened," Chris said. "I thought I was a wreck, but Cindy says I calmly picked my gun up, pointed it out the window, aimed and shot. That quick."
He actually fired three times, and the buck collapsed following the third boom.
When he got his land legs under him, Chris almost ran to the downed whitetail. He was 10 yards away from it when he realized it was far bigger than he'd thought.
"I said 'Whoa,' and she asked 'What's wrong? Is it trying to get away?' I said 'No, he's done. This is real. This really just happened. This is crazy. It's a GIANT of a deer!'"
Almost immediately, Chris texted a photo of the buck lying in the field to his cousin, Jake, who had elected not to accompany him that day.
The whitetail might have worn a world-class rack, which has a BTR composite score of 204 3/8 inches, but it was smaller than average in body.
"It was really run down. Probably weighed between 175 and 180 pounds on the hoof, down from what was surely 200 before the rut," Chris said.
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