Twenty-one-year-old Cody Likin smoked a 150-class buck in 2013, the first year he hunted the Nicholas County wildlife management area his uncle had recommended. When he scored the following year, he was carrying his bow instead of a blackpowder rifle.
Cody is a student at Eastern Kentucky University. He lives in Laurel County, about two hours south of the WMA.
Neither kept him from scouting the tract in 2014, laying down boot leather and, in October, hanging a camera on a heavily used deer trail. He saw and collected photographs of several bucks.
Cody passed up a 130-inch 8-pointer during the state’s early muzzleloader hunt. On the eve of the regular rifle season, he and some family members took their bows with the idea of hunting an archery-only section of the WMA.
They drove an RV up there with plans to bowhunt from Wednesday, Nov. 5, through the following Monday morning. Cody came separately, the last to arrive.
He hiked 45 minutes to hunt from the same lock-on-type stand every day. The spot, between feeding and bedding areas, had been full of buck sign earlier.
“Around 9:00 on Friday morning, a light rain was falling, which is probably why I didn’t hear the buck coming,” Cody told Dale Weddle, who’s writing the story for Rack magazine. “When I caught sight of it, it was coming off a ridge about 75 yards away, headed for the thicket in front of me.”
But the deer was too far for a bow shot, which is why Cody took his climber with him on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.
About 7:20 Sunday, Cody watched a 6-pointer cruise through the area. He saw its grandfather a few minutes later.
“When I first saw the buck, honestly, I think I grabbed my heart. There was no doubt how big it was,” he said.
The shot was a 30-yarder.
“The buck did a weird kick, and then ran down a little gully and back up a small ridge where it stopped and started wobbling. Then it just wiped out,” Cody said.
Had the rack been measured for the BTR the year the deer was harvested, Cody’s buck would have been the runner-up to the Kentucky record (among Semi-irregulars in the compound bow category). Today, it occupies the No. 5 spot.
The antlers tally 201 inches.
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