After striking out on the first day of the two-day Kansas Youth Hunt in late September 2007, Jerry Livingston had serious moral reservations about taking
his son James back out on Sunday afternoon. But the father-and-son team did go back out, and they came home with the buck of a lifetime!
By Jerry Livingston
Amazingly, 13-year-old James Livingston shot this massive 25-point buck on public land while stalk-hunting with his dad, Jerry, on the last afternoon of the 2007 Kansas Youth Hunt. "The moment he saw the buck, James seemingly cut the cord and took on a life of his own," Jerry proudly remembered. "He was on a mission, and he made a perfect shot!"
My family is from Utah and Idaho. I grew up a passionate mule deer hunter and introduced my sons to the sport when they were old enough to qualify for a license. Some of my fondest memories are hunting mule deer with my dad and my sons in the expansive national forests of Utah and Idaho. I never entertained the idea of living anywhere but in the West.
All of that changed in July 2006 when my work brought our family to northeastern Kansas. Although totally different from the West, Kansas held a lot of intrigue for us. I love pheasant hunting, and we now had 100,000 acres of public land to hunt within close proximity of our new home. As an added bonus, we quickly learned that the area was also one of the top producers of big whitetails.
Pheasants dominated the fall of 2006 for me and my two sons, James, 12, and Tyler, 17. Whitetails were on our mind, but at the time pheasants were our primary focus. Our attitudes toward whitetails changed drastically one morning while driving down I-70 to go pheasant hunting. We came upon a massive whitetail buck that had been killed by a westbound vehicle. I don't know how I ever spotted the deer in the borrow pit, but as my sons and I stood over this massive trophy whitetail, we were amazed at his beauty and size. I wrapped my hands around those giant bases and admired the dense, compact rack.
We obtained a salvage tag for the buck and went to a local taxidermist, Ron Ridley, of Double R Taxidermy, to get it mounted. Spending time with Ron and seeing the massive bucks in his studio was the final step in my whitetail conversion. I was getting hooked, and my boys were right there with me. This was how a family of dyed-in-the-wool mule deer hunters welcomed and embraced a brand-new species into its hunting schedule.
A FIRST STAB AT WHITETAILS
A few days after finding the I-70 buck, we purchased rifle tags for the 2006 season and made a somewhat feeble attempt to hunt the public land near our home. We had fun, but we didn't know the area or how to hunt these deer. We really didn't have the resources to be successful that first fall. However, we did walk away from that season committed to being ready for 2007.
Since you have to choose your weapon in Kansas, Tyler, my older son, and I decided to go with archery tackle. We thought that the ability to hunt the rut would give us our best chance to harvest a monster. James, my younger son, who's simply not yet quite strong enough for a bow, was on the outside looking in as Tyler and I painstakingly selected bows, arrows and all the gear we would need to have a legitimate chance at a whopper in 2007.
I felt bad that James couldn't be a more active participant in this process, but I promised to make it up to him by taking him out on the 2007 Kansas Youth Hunt in late September. I told him he could use his grandpa's .243, the same gun with which he had harvested his first deer (a mule deer buck in Wyoming in 2006). That Wyoming hunt had been a real thrill for James and had solidified his interest in deer hunting.
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