The Kontras and Van Lith Bucks, Two Record Deer That Changed Bowhunting

There’s a pattern emerging in the world of trophy whitetail hunting. It’s how two of the greatest bucks of all time were taken last season, and it’s how the world record may be shattered this fall.

I’m no gambling man, but I’d bet the title card to my four-wheel-drive (if I had one) that the all-time world whitetail record is going to be broken this fall. And I bet I can predict where the buck is going to come from and who is going to take it. No, I’m not psychic. Nor do I have access to any inside information. But the statistics keep mounting year after year, making obvious conclusions for an honest, thinking man inescapable.

Consider the simple fact that, for example, the Midwest far outranks the rest of the nation for coughing up record-book bucks. But don’t stop there. Look at recent trends: State records for typical bow-killed deer fell just last fall in Minnesota (Minnesota’s fell the previous year as well), in Ohio and in Michigan. Not coincidentally, last year’s new No. 2 and No. 3 (tie) typical Pope and Young Club bucks came from the Midwest — Ohio and Minnesota, respectively.

So where is the new typical world record going to come from this fall? Minnesota probably, Ohio maybe and quite possibly Kansas or Iowa. That’s a safe bet, especially when you consider last winter’s record mild weather across the Midwest. And after you read the following stories behind two of the biggest bucks taken in the nation last year, you’ll see who is going to do it. All the arrows seem to be pointing in the same direction — a bowhunter is going to be the Chosen One.

From these two accounts, you’ll also notice a definite pattern that is as informative as it is interesting: Both bucks were taken by experienced bowhunters hunting close to home, both animals were observed throughout a three-year period and both hunters were able to identify a hotspot where a monster buck wasn’t supposed to be — a core area, within spitting distances of roads and houses and people and dogs.

The Bill Kontras Buck

Bill Kontras of Springfield, Ohio, like most bowhunters, experiences some excitement when he erects a new stand. One writer likened the emotion to the feelings of children hanging handmade ornaments on a family-felled Christmas tree; the feelings are the culmination of months of expectation, and they are the beginnings of even more intense anticipation, as the children wonder about the better things yet to come.

Kontras had enjoyed those emotions many times during his six years of bowhunting, but never had the feelings been as strong as they were last November 13. Things were looking good for the central Ohio bowhunter. The area around his selected tree contained a lot of fresh sign — droppings, rubs, beds and so on. But none was as fresh as the sign that stood in front of him.

Kontras was halfway up his selected tree, trimming limbs and screwing in steps, when he was interrupted. One minute, the stubble field in front of his stand had been empty, and then suddenly, like an apparition, a whitetail buck had appeared.

Like a hiding fox squirrel, Kontras flattened himself against the trunk of the pine, moving only his head enough to peek glances at the grazing whitetail. Everything about the deer seemed oversize, including the thick, bullish body that met a neck that looked at least 24 inches around at its smallest.

The deer’s neck was swollen both from the rut and from having to support the monstrous rack. From his perch 40 yards away, Kontras could tell that this was the buck he had watched develop for four years. There was no mistaking the silver-dollar-thick main beams, each stretching close to 30 inches from base to tip. The buck’s rack was tall, some points more than 13 inches in length, and it was nearly two feet across at its widest.

The 12-pointer that Kontras watched for 45 minutes as he clung to his tree would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest whitetails ever. But the story of what will forever be known as “the Kontras Buck” involves more than just a deer with an extraordinary rack. It’s a trilogy in which the tales of the hunt and the hunter rival the greatness of the story of the hunted.

Six months earlier, Bill Kontras was a very happy man. A quiet man with simple tastes for life, Kontras was riding the crest from the previous bow season, in which he had taken an 11-point whitetail. He had been a little disappointed that it had barely missed making the Pope and Young listings, but more important to him was the feeling of satisfaction he felt inside.

“I got, and still get, a sense of accomplishment from the buck I got in 1985,” said Kontras. “It was the first time that I had really felt like I had earned one. I spent nine months, sometimes in sub-zero weather, figuring his patterns before I tried to hunt him.”

Unlike some sportsmen who boast of using modern, complicated equipment to improve their shooting, Kontras thinks more of his skills as a hunter than a shooter. He takes great pride in the fact that he made the mere nine-yard shot with a simple, sightless recurve.

Then, in late May 1986, Kontras, whose tall, athletic build discloses a lifelong dedication to good health, noticed a swelling on the left side of his back that was numb to the touch. Tests were run, and the diagnosis was one of the most feared words known to man — cancer.

It was a good-news/bad-news proposition. Doctors felt that Kontras’ life could be saved, but they made no promises about his left arm. Even if the limb could be spared, its future usefulness was doubtful. As with most patients. Kontras was both scared and confused going into surgery.

“I tried not to think about bowhunting, but it was impossible,” he said. “I love my wife and kids dearly, but being in the woods is second only to them.”

The first thing Kontras remembers after his surgery is awakening and seeing his left arm still intact. Even in his groggy, semiconscious condition, he vowed that he would bowhunt the following fall, despite the long odds and the pain that he knew would come.

Three weeks after surgery, Kontras tried but failed to lift his young daughter’s tiny target bow. After a week of trying, he not only raised the bow, but he managed to tug the string of the 12-pound-pull bow three inches back.

The pain was great from where the doctors had been forced to remove a large section of muscle. Still, Kontras kept at the slow and painful process.

The weak bows he practiced with and his thoughts of bowhunting were both his physical and mental therapy, pulling him out of depression and rebuilding his weakened body. It was a step-by-step strengthening process, as Kontras moved from target bows to lightweight hunting recurves.

Once, he considered regressing back to the compound bow he’d given up in 1984. “I tried a compound because it was so much easier to hold. but I just couldn’t get myself to hunt with it,” Kontras said, almost apologetically. “Within an hour, I was getting good groups at 20 yards, and that’s just too easy. I like a challenge: once something gets easy, I want to make it hard again.”

Kontras eventually peaked with a 55- pound recurve. By early September, he could shoot three arrows from the bow before fatigue and discomfort forced him to quit. A little later, he worked his way up to volleys of 10.

Most bowhunters measure their scouting time in weeks or even months, but because of his illness, regular job and family commitments, Kontras’ scouting time consisted of a few hours. Luckily, he could rely on knowledge he’d gained during the past several seasons.

“I knew of one good buck that I had been watching since 1983,” he explained. “I had seen him every year in the same area, doing the same things, and I knew he’d probably still be using the same bedding area. I’m almost positive that I could have taken him in 1985, but I think the 11-point that I got was bigger than him at that time.”

Kontras checked the buck’s territory, and he found everything — the rubs, scrapes, beds and other sign — as it had been the years before. The only differences were the heights and depths of the scars the buck left in wrist-thick saplings, and this indicated that the whitetail had grown to trophy proportions.

Kontras’ next trip into the area was his interrupted stand-building expedition during the bow season. The big white tail’s appearance halted the hunter’s construction attempts for the rest of the waning day.

Mid-afternoon that following day, Kontras was back in the evergreen working hard to erect his stand. What had been a relaxed 45-minute job the year before was now 2 1/2 hours of hard labor for the basically one-armed Kontras. The strains of climbing the tree and installing the platform had soaked him with perspiration.

Now, he stood 18 feet above the ground, shivering in below-freezing temperatures and a stiff winter wind. Kontras’ muscles tightened with each passing minute, and he flexed his bow continuously to keep his body from locking up. For added warmth, he occasionally looked to his left at a fresh scrape that the big whitetail had etched into the ground sometime during the night.

Most hunts for trophy whitetails are measured in weeks or sometimes even seasons. This time, it was a matter of minutes. Within an hour, two does streaked from the cover at Kontras’ left. Both were skittish and checking their backtrail. Kontras knew the buck was on his way.

For 30 minutes, the hunter watched the whitetails play a cat-and-mouse game as the buck tried to stay close to the unromantic does. Three times, the huge whitetail was within 25 yards of Kontras, and each time, he passed up the shot, waiting for a closer, higher-percentage opportunity.

After what seemed like an eternity, the does caught wind of the mock scrape that Kontras had placed 16 yards from his stand. The buck followed, and Kontras took his shot.

But rather than the satisfying sound of arrow meeting deer, Kontras heard a loud, bothersome clank. A heart that had seconds before been racing with adrenalin now slowed in disappointment.

“It sounded identical to the noise made when an arrow strikes a rock,” Kontras said. “I was so positive that I had missed that I only stayed in my stand another 25 minutes rather than the usual hour I wait after I take a shot.”

Kontras was surprised at the difficulty he had finding his arrow on the nearly bare ground. He discovered why when he spotted several small drops or blood. The trail of dots gave out within 20 yards. He went for what he considered his only hope.

Kontras credits his friend Dave Charles with teaching him 95 percent of what he knows about whitetails. He also sincerely feels that Charles is one of the best all-around woodsmen in the nation, and Charles’ skills include the ability to bloodtrail.

Late that night, after Charles finished his second-shift job, he, Kontras and another friend, Pete Willis, were back at the field.

Using two Coleman lanterns, they found where the buck had been standing when Kontras had taken his shot. “Let’s look for hair first,” said Charles. Kontras watched with amazement when after several minutes of scrutinizing the ground, Charles lifted a few dark hairs, examined them and then said, “You hit him high, Bill, but I think we’ll find him.”

When the scant blood trail disappeared, Charles began the meticulous hands-and-knees job of track-trailing the buck. The small group continued at a snail’s pace, the anxiety building within Kontras with each stuttered step.

Then, 150 yards from where they had started, Kontras lifted his strained eyes from the ground and peered into the night. There, at the very edge of where the lantern’s white light disappeared into the dark, Kontras saw an antler tip.

Kneeling beside the fallen buck, Charles, an avid trophy bowhunter, ran his hands over the gigantic rack. “My God, Bill, what have you done?” he asked.

They found out, following the mandatory 60-day antler drying period required before officially measuring Boone and Crockett and Pope and Young trophy candidates. Kontras’ buck measured in at 201 1/8 points, smashing the previous Ohio gun and bow records. It is the largest bow-killed whitetail to be taken in more than two decades, and it is the second-largest arrow-felled whitetail of all-time!

Yet, the rack of the whitetail is deceiving. Most people underestimate its score when they first see it: Kontras himself guessed the rack to be in the 160-point range as he watched the buck graze the day prior to taking him.

The reason is the type and shape of the rack. The rack hides its own greatness. The long main beams curve to within six inches of touching, making the rack look like a tall, worn ivory-colored, crown.

There is not one photographic angle that does the buck justice. A person has to spend several minutes looking at the antlers to comprehend the immenseness of the headgear.

Most sportsmen wonder how any whitetail bucks, let alone a brute such as Kontras’, could have been so easily patterned. Kontras believes the case of the patterning was simply because the buck had seldom, if ever, been spooked by a man.

Thc part of central Ohio where Kontras lives and hunts is, as a whole, heavily hunted and densely populated. So, how did he find a pristine area that harbored an undisturbed trophy?

“I try to look for areas that no other hunter would think about hunting,” Kontras said. “I like to hunt areas that are so small and obvious that all other hunters pass them by.”

Earlier this year, Kontras took me to the spot where he arrowed his trophy. When we stepped from the truck, he asked. “What would you think about hunting this property?” A muffled snicker was my reply.

The area looked like a golf course, as it was made up mostly of closely cropped grass. farm ponds and a few exaggerated roughs. “I know it doesn’t look like much,” he said. “but try to focus in on small areas instead of the whole thing.”

My eyes slowly moved across the land, and they eventually settled on a small, three to five-acre section of swamp. From a deer’s standpoint, it was perfect. It sat low, and it was surrounded on two sides by open pasture land and on a third side by a pond. There were two easy escape routes for a whitetail. One, which was a slender ribbon of saplings and grass, led to the grainfield where Kontras had been waiting.

But it was the fourth side of the oasis that was the most interesting. It was a well traveled country road. “This buck basically lived an undisturbed life in that tiny swamp,” Kontras explained, “even though a lot of hunters drove by within 50 yards.”

Prior to last year, to make sure his deer of choice remained undisturbed, Kontras, like most good trophy hunters, did most of his scouting from the end of one deer season until a month before the next. He then stayed completely out of the area until the rut, when the particular buck he was after was the most consistent, and he only hunted when all of the weather and wind conditions were in his favor.

The Curt Van Lith Buck

The similarities between the Kontras Buck and the whitetail that will likely be judged the No. 3 Pope and Young head of all time are striking. Curt Van Lith, a 30-year-old Minnesota highway construction worker, has taken 11 deer with a bow. His latest one, which scored 197 6/8 Pope and Young points, is the largest typical bow-killed whitetail to have come out of his home state. He shot it early in the season (September 27, 1986), well before the rut, when big bucks aren’t supposed to be vulnerable. It was no fluke. Van Lith hunted within a few miles of his home in suburban/agricultural southern Minnesota, and he knew every square foot of the home range of a nearby deer herd. He had also sighted the huge trophy three years before, right after he had downed a fat doe. The big buck had trotted by Van Lith’s stand only 12 yards away as the hunter was climbing down.

“I couldn’t believe that rack,” he said. “It was like the drawing of an over-imaginative outdoor artist — actually too thick and too heavy. I knew right then that I was going to dedicate myself to him.”

But during the following two years, Van Lith saw only gigantic tracks and adrenaline-inspiring antler rubs that had been left behind by the buck of his dreams.

“Every fall, the same pattern repeated itself,” he said. “The buck would use a trail bordering a woodlot that was adjacent to a cornfield my father-in-law had planted. And 50 or 60 trees would be shredded up in the woodlot, always in the same general area. None would be less than four inches in diameter, and the largest would be eight inches around. I used to shiver when I thought about that big rack and neck working those trees over.”

Van Lith then set out to do what any logical hunter would do. He monitored the same trail, hoping for a repeat performance should the buck either head for its bedding area or make the rounds to check out one of the many scrapes scattered throughout the woodlot. And for good measure, Van Lith had backup stands along a nearby river bottom — a logical choice for a big-buck hide-out.

The area Van Lith hunts is Midwest meat-and-potatoes farm-country habitat. Picture four rural homes scattered along a mile stretch of township road. Between them arc small pockets of woods and brushy drainages with alternating corn and soybean fields. Where could a buck hold out, besides the woodlots and drainages?

In the summer and fall of ’85, the big clue came Van Lith’s way, but he overlooked it. The buck was sighted near the 18-acre corn patch his father-in-law worked.

“It got to the point that I wondered if the buck was a ghost,” Van Lith recalled. “He’d leave clues of his comings and goings, but exactly where he came from or exactly where he was heading during the day remained a mystery. Finally, I thought, ‘What the heck, why not snoop around where the buck shouldn’t be?’ I vowed that the 1986 season was going to be different.”

So, after two frustrating years of going over every detail with a mental Geiger counter and coming up empty-handed, Van Lith realized he had to start all over from scratch. Reluctantly, somewhat sheepishly, Van Lith wandered along the edge of the corn patch that August. Sure enough, he saw only small deer tracks. But as he moved in a few rows, he knew he had stumbled onto the missing piece of the puzzle.

“There were big tracks all over, and the area was really stampeded,” he said. “This wasn’t just the buck’s bedroom, but it was his living room and probably his kitchen. He had to have been spending most of his daylight hours in there, and I had been avoiding it like the plague. I felt so stupid.”

Quickly, Van Lith got out of the corn patch and began plotting his strategy. He had a full month before the 1986 bow season, so there was plenty of time to set something up and leave it alone. As he surveyed the layout of the land, it soon became evident that the only place to intercept the buck was from an overgrown fenceline that bordered the cornfield on its east side. A lone, forked elm tree — overlooking a deer trail 10 yards away — beckoned for Van Lith to place a portable tree stand in it. He put one up, 18 feet above the ground on the outside limb, and then he left the area alone until the season opener.

On opening day of the bow season, Van Lith had to work. On the following Sunday, he hunted the treeline, and all he saw were a couple of dogs frolicking in nearby fields. He felt weird about it all, but he decided to stick to his game plan. Later that week, it rained, and because this shut down his road construction job, Van Lith was able put in two more days on the treeline. Again, no deer were sighted, much less the big buck.

The following week brought more rain and more time off to hunt. Instead of hunting the treeline, though, Van Lith took a stand in the woodlot. Again. he saw nothing. The weekend held promise of clear weather. and another decision had to be made.

“I still felt crazy,” Van Lith reflected, “but I just had a feeling that time was on my side.”

His hunch paid off. The following Saturday, at about 6:15 p.m., he heard some noise coming from the corn patch. A cat chasing a mouse? After studying every corn tassel carefully, he remembered looking across the field at his neighbor’s house. Then, he turned toward his father-in-law’s place, which was in the other direction. Just then, another noise from the corn patch interrupted Van Lith’s second thoughts. A mourning dove flew out of the corn and over his head. A fox mousing around?

A third noise from the cornfield, together with cornstalks moving and chafing against one another, finally got the hunter’s full attention. A deer? Before long, huge antler tips protruding above the cornstalks sent surges of adrenaline through Van Lith’s veins, and he began to shake violently. As the buck stepped out of the corn, it turned and began feeding into the wind along a narrow grassy carpet that lay between the treeline and the cornfield. The closer the buck got, the bigger the rack seemed to grow. Finally, Van Lith talked himself out of the shakes and settled down. His buck was now standing broadside, 30 yards away, Van Lith held off. In a few moments, the buck would be 10 or 15 yards from the stand, so why risk it, he asked himself?

Suddenly, totally without warning, the big buck stretched his huge neck out and looked straight up at Van Lith.

“I froze,” Van Lith recalled. “I was terrified. Here, I had him right where I wanted him, and all of a sudden he’s looking at me like he knew I was there. It was the worst sinking feeling imaginable.”

Slowly, the buck did an about-face and headed down the treeline, looking back only once before disappearing. Van Lith mentally kicked himself for not taking the 30-yard shot. How could he have been so overconfident?

But destiny ruled on behalf of Van Lith after all. For some reason. the buck crossed the treeline and reversed his direction. He headed right back toward Van Lith on the other side of the treeline, and he gave the bowhunter a second chance, just when it had seemed that all hope had vanished. Of course, Van Lith was ready. But it was going to be a long shot — longer than the one he had just passed up. This time, his mind was made up. and his four-bladed Savora broadhead was pointed through an opening in the treeline as the buck squeezed by. At the arrow’s impact, the buck hunched and steered dead for the woods.

With the help of several family members, a late evening chase scene ended at midnight in a stalemate. The following morning, Van Lith managed to recover the huge deer. but it took the concentration of a combat soldier because the buck’s trail was lost many times. The deer had doubled back several times, had swam through the middle of a pond, and had broken through a wire-fenced corral before finally succumbing.

Just how impressive is Van Lith’s buck? The heavy-beamed rack made the deer’s 264-pound (dressed) body look small. Veteran Pope and Young as well as Boone and Crockett scorer Dave Boland told me that this is a very rare rack, one very close to world-record proportions.

“Its gross score was 218,” Boland said. “But it only had 1 1/2 points deducted for non-typical points. That meant about 18 points were lost due to miss-matched beams. So, if two tines were switched around, say the third on the left with the third on the right, you’d be looking at the new world record.”

This story, “A Tale of Two Bucks,” appeared in the July 1987 issue of Outdoor Life. Although Kontras’ buck is not entered in Boone and Crockett or Pope and Young Record books, it’s still one of the biggest bucks ever taken in Ohio. the Van Lith buck is still listed as one of the top 10 typical bow-killed bucks of all time in the P&Y records.