Rack Report | 12-Year-Old Kentucky Hunter Shoots Goliath 8-Pointer

Kentucky youth hunter William “Anse” Brantley bagged this giant 8-point on opening evening of the 2026 youth season. Author Image

Humor me, for a moment, while I play the role of “that dad,” the one who’s showing off pictures and telling stories about the deer that his kid killed. My kid is 12-year-old Anse Brantley (pronounced like “Lance,” but without the L and spelled with an S). Anse has been hunting with me since before he could walk, and that’s not an exaggeration. I used to carry him, along with a diaper bag and a 16-gauge shotgun, under one arm through the Kentucky squirrel woods. He shot his first squirrel at age 6, and then his first buck a few weeks later.

I’ve heard other adults, well-meaning of course, refer to him as “quite the little hunter.” But that doesn’t adequately describe him. He’s relentless, and as naturally talented of a woodsman as anyone I’ve seen, and I’m not the sort of parent to claim he’s talented at everything. He will never be a good basketball player, for example. But he is a great hunter. Back in August, he went squirrel hunting alone one morning, and I told him that if he wanted my help cleaning them, he had to carry his .22 and only take head shots. He returned with his limit of six, all hit clean through the noggins, and told me to get my knife sharp.

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Anse’s first deer was taken on our family farm in western Kentucky, within a few hundred yards of where I killed my first squirrel 36 years ago. And we were hunting from a box blind only a few hundred yards from that on the evening of October 10, opening day of Kentucky’s youth deer season. Anse’s Pawpaw Larry built that box blind years ago, and it carries the wear of many hunting seasons. It tipped over during a tornado one spring, which shattered the Plexi-glass windows, but we stood it back up with a backhoe. There’s a hole through the right-side window seal where I buried a 3-blade Rage broadhead one fall, while shooting at a turkey. We’ve taken a bunch of deer out of that stand. We had to shore it up last summer, with some new blocks under the legs and a new ladder to replace the rotten one. But inside, once you spray the wasps and sweep away the owl poop, the structure is solid.

The big deer stepped out in the pouring rain with about 45 minutes of shooting light remaining. Image by Michelle Brantley

Our farm is a couple hundred acres, mostly bottomland and timber, and a good distance away from any significant row crop agriculture. We plant food plots where we can and run a few feeders, and we’ve killed some nice bucks there over the years, with most of them topping out in the 120 to 140 range. It’s a place that’s almost completely void of cell phone service, and a 4-wheel drive is required to even access it. The trail cameras we run are old-school, and sometimes we go a couple weeks before pulling cards. Every once in a while, especially from October through December, some exceptional buck ambles out of the wild and wooly cover and makes an appearance — usually in the middle of the night — on one of our cameras.

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Just such a deer appeared near a feeder a little after 9 p.m. on the night of Sept. 23, this year. We’ve been hunting a particular buck that looked similar for the past three seasons, although that deer was a 10-pointer last year, and this year’s buck was a giant 8. The buck’s habits and frame matched up, even if the rack had changed a good bit. We debated on whether or not it was the same deer from last year — but either way, this year’s 8-pointer was huge.

Anse Brantley and his mom, Michelle, are all smiles behind the giant buck. Author Image

Not that Anse particularly planned to hold out for him on the afternoon of the 10th. It was pouring rain when we settled into the blind early that afternoon, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias swept inland. But we had a good north wind in our face, and it was chilly enough to need a jacket for the first time this season. Michelle — wife and mom — was hunting a different stand on the other end of the property, the stand where we’d gotten pictures of the giant 8 on the 23rd, as a matter of fact.

I told Anse that I expected the deer to move, and that we’d probably see a shooter buck before dark. He said he was only after a mature deer, anything 120 or bigger, and that he “hoped Mama would get that great big one.”

We saw a couple young bucks first thing, and they squared off and sparred in front of us. Does filtered in and out of the field as the evening wore on, and one of them in particular was drawing attention from multiple young bucks as she darted in and out of a thicket in front of us. “It’s early, but I think that doe in that thicket is already in heat,” I told Anse.

Anse and author Will Brantley, Realtree.com editor, show off the buck the next morning. Image by Michelle Brantley

Rain was coming down steady, and we had 45 minutes of shooting light left when a buck darted out of the timber and into the thicket. Anse saw him better than I did. “Looked like a shooter, and he’s after that doe!” he hissed. His rifle was locked into a BOG Death Grip tripod, and we both glassed the edges, looking for hints of deer emerging from the thicket in the fading light and falling rain. I panned to my right and spotted the buck, just his white throat patch, head, and antlers peering over the top of some willows, in a spot that’s perpetually too sloppy to mow in the summer and sometimes sits a few wood ducks in the fall.

I had to take a moment to process what I was seeing, because it was the sort of buck to pop into a dream, but then you awake and it’s not real. I’ve been hunting whitetails and writing about it for a long time. I’ve had the antlers of all three of the largest non-typical bucks ever taken by hunters in my hands. But I recognized instantly that this deer was something special, and without a doubt the most impressive whitetail I’d ever seen on the hoof. It was my job to maintain some modicum of composure.

“Anse, there’s a good deer standing in the edge of those willows,” I said through my binocular. “You seem him?”

Anse glassed the edge and said “no” at first — but then he stopped. “Wait. Yeah, big one, I’m on him.” The buck stepped forward into the rain and staring at the thicket, to an opening that I’d already ranged at 122 yards. I turned to my son, and almost instinctively reached to help him with his scope. But he was already zoomed in, and had eased the safety off. For the briefest moment, it occurred to me that he no longer needed my help with his rifle. “I’m on him, here we go,” he said.

Brantley was shooting a suppressed Bergara MG MicroLite in 6.5 Creedmoor. One bullet through the vitals did the job, and the deer only ran about 30 yards. Image by Michelle Brantley

I looked at the buck again through my glass, and saw it lurch forward at the crack of the rifle. The massive deer scrambled ahead, nose down and tail tucked, and I said, “You hit him hard!” just as the buck stopped and fell over. We radioed Michelle and told her what had happened. She had no plans of finishing her sit with such a recovery ahead.

The buck lay still in the rain, hit clean through the heart and both lungs. I’ve only taken a handful of deer that seemed to grow after the trigger was pulled, but this one certainly did. Its beams are a stunning 26 7/8 and 27 inches long, respectively, complemented by 14-inch G2s, 10-inch G3s, and 6-inch bases. I’m no official scorer, but I am familiar with the system. After measuring the buck twice, I came up with 168, and with less than 4 inches of deduction to boot. The buck’s symmetry is among his most impressive traits, and provided my math is correct, that score would put him in the company of Kentucky’s largest all-time 8-pointers.

At minimum, the buck is larger buck than any whitetail I’ve ever taken myself. But no worries there. I plan to milk this thing, and be “that dad” who’s showing off pics of my kid’s buck for as long as I can.

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