Mike Handley posted on May 31, 2011 07:42
By Mike Handley
The never-before-seen buck might’ve been shadowing the big doe that reached the food plot moments earlier.
Or it might’ve just been hungry.
Regardless of what lured it into the open at dusk on Jan. 3, the clover was its last meal.
Before Kenneth Bordelon climbed into his favorite ladder stand in Avoyelles Parish that Monday, he’d never shot a buck bigger than a 14-inch-wide 8-pointer. By the time he got down from his perch a couple of hours later, he’d twice hammered not only the biggest whitetail ever seen in that parish, but also the seventh-largest in all of Louisiana (among rifle-taken Irregulars).
So shocked at having even seen such a buck on the hoof, the hunter from Vick, La., doesn’t remember his boots touching a single rung on his way down the ladder. For all he knows, he floated the 300 yards to the 25-pointer lying dead in his food plot.
“I was going to wait about 10 or 15 minutes before going to it, but I couldn’t,” he admitted. Equally impatient were his father and a cousin, who were also hunting that afternoon and heard both shots. They were punching Ken’s number into their cell phones before he even had a chance to count the gnarly rack’s points.
“They wanted to know what I’d shot,” Ken said. “At first, I called it a 12- or 14-pointer … until I finally counted everything that could be considered a point.”
Ken had no idea what the antlers would score. His buddies thought the rack would fall between 190 and 200 inches (including the 18-inch inside spread). Only when it was taped for the big buck contest at Simmons’ Sporting Goods in Bastrop did Ken learn the buck’s crown was 30 to 40 inches bigger than anyone had guessed.
I had the pleasure of measuring Ken’s deer during a swing through south Louisiana in February. The rack is a mainframe 5x4 with 16 add-ons. Its composite (true gross) score is 230 7/8 inches; its official BTR score is 212 7/8.
Greg Hicks’ story about the Bordelon Buck will appear in the September issue of Rack magazine.