BARRY KERN OVERCAME THE ODDS TO REALIZE HIS SHOT AT A TRUE PENNSYLVANIA GIANT.

As bowhunters, we enter every season with the hope that fate will smile on us, that this will be the year that we finally put an arrow in the "big one." We spend hours watching “celebrity” hunters kill mature bucks, wishing that, one day, we’ll have the chance to drop the hammer on a giant buck.

On the evening of Oct. 19, 2010, that dream became reality for myself and two of my good friends, Ryan Grandel and Vince Kraft. The three of us set out each year to harvest a mature buck and to catch all of the action on video. We’ve been filming our hunts for about five years now, and we spend countless hours scouting, monitoring trail cameras and practicing with our bows during the off-season. We spend as much time in the woods as we can.

But as any serious bowhunter knows, not everything goes according to plan. In February 2008, I lost parts of two fingers in an accident at work. The fingers I lost happened to be the third and fourth on my right hand, my shooting hand. Despite the accident and the loss I faced, I was fortunate not to have lost my trigger finger.