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One Last Siesta For This KS Giant
By Patrick Dunning
The last time Anthony Callihan posed for a photo with a buck alongside his grandfather, he was a mere six years old with wide eyes for his family’s tradition. Fast forward nearly four decades to December 2023, the 42-year-old harvested a 270-class buck he’d never seen on opening day of Kansas’ rifle season and got to celebrate the moment with his grandfather after a short recovery and snap a couple pictures for old time’s sake.
In the early 1980s Anthony’s grandpa retrofitted more than a dozen underground gas tanks into 17 ft. tall metal tower hunting stands with wooden benches and wrap-around windows. The stands were then placed across different hunting properties in the area and are still utilized today.
“I love bow hunting, but when it gets really cold, it’s brutal in a tree. When my grandpa moved to Coffey County around 40 years ago, he started building these stands,” Anthony told Buckmasters. “All of them have portable heaters for cold weather situations, it’s perfect.”
The tower stand Anthony was situated in when he shot the deer overlooks a milo field and a strip of thick CRP. The 33-pointer woke up from its afternoon nap around 4:40 p.m. and Anthony made a lethal 105-yard shot on the specimen with his .30-06 less than a minute later.
“He put his head down and disappeared, so I picked my rifle up and started looking through my scope for movement. That’s when I saw his drop tine. I waited for an opening, found a pocket and pulled the trigger,” Anthony said. “I still get goosebumps thinking about it. Felt like I needed to go buy a power ball ticket that night.”
The whitetail’s rack features 22 irregular points as a mainframe 6x5 and carries 254 6/8 inches of antler.
Buckmasters scorer Brad Forbus measured Anthony’s Coffey County trophy 270 2/8 inches (BTR) this past weekend, which is good enough for Kansas’ #7 spot in BTR’s centerfire rifle category.
You can read the full story of this bonafide bruiser in a future issue of Buckmasters magazine.