It was cold, foggy, and icy in north-central Kansas on Dec. 15, and Josh Keltner had been looking forward to getting out with his family on the final day of the state’s gun deer season. A retired U.S. Army veteran, Keltner was still new to hunting the Sunflower State and he had never tagged a whitetail before. He’d be hunting alone that day, though, since his wife and kids decided to stay in.
“I almost didn’t go, either, because it was so cold – in the 20s,” Keltner tells Outdoor Life. “We hunt as a family as much as we can. But that frigid day they stayed home.”
He rolled out of bed and got his hunting gear anyways. He then headed to a ground blind he’d placed on a friend’s 40 acres that was honeycombed with deer trails.
Keltner got to his ground blind just after 6 a.m., well before daylight. He saw nothing for the first couple hours, and by 8 a.m. he was already thinking about what he’d do the rest of the day.
“I wanted to leave the blind, but talked myself into staying a bit longer,” says a 46-year-old Keltner. “That’s when I saw a doe walking straight to me at 50 yards. She was on a trail, and I thought about shooting her because it was the last day of the season. But then I saw another deer with big antlers behind her in some bushes.”
It was a welcome sight for Keltner, who moved to Kansas with his family last year after retiring from the Army. He’d grown up in Montana hunting elk, mule deer, and antelope. But his service in the military, which included a deployment to Afghanistan, kept him from hunting for around 15 years. He’d never taken a whitetail, and last year was the first time he’d ever hunted from a ground blind.
Even then, Keltner knew he was looking at a giant buck.
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“I didn’t want to look at the buck’s rack,” he says. “I just wanted to concentrate on putting my crosshairs on his chest. He was looking right at me, and so was the doe.”
Keltner took the 80-yard shot with the buck facing right him. He fired one shot with his Browning rifle, and the 180-grain bullet struck perfectly, hitting the deer’s lungs and heart. The buck turned and ran toward a nearby creek but didn’t make it very far.
“I was shaking with excitement, and the whole blind was rocking up and down with me inside it. I couldn’t get out of the blind fast enough, and I found him dead just beyond the creek.”
Keltner immediately called his wife, Daedra, to share the news, and she left home with two of their four children, Kolby and Taylor.
“It was fantastic when she got there, and the kids could put their hands on a deer,” Keltner recalls. “Then we made photos, field dressed the buck, and I dragged it out of the creek area.”
From there they took the buck to a processor. Then they brought the head to a taxidermist, who estimated the buck at 5.5 years old and gave the 19-point rack a green gross score of 190 1/8 inches.
“He asked me if I was going to enter it in the Boone and Crockett record book after its rack is measured again following a 60-day drying period,” Keltner says. “That’s something I never even thought about. It’s all new to me, this whitetail deer hunting from a ground blind. It’s a lot different than what I did growing up in Montana.”
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