The yard was like a parking lot, the farmer's shop a veritable Wal-Mart on Black Friday. But it was the first Thursday in December, and the crowd wasn't there to find a deal on a flatscreen TV or the must-have toy du jour.

They came to see Colton Lowry's buck, a deer that had set tongues wagging long before Colton came home from college for the short Kansas rifle season.

Someone had videotaped the double drop-tined buck when it was very much alive. Trail cameras all over that corner of Norton County had captured its image. And several folks had actually seen the deer that even experts might've claimed had been Photoshopped because the rack seemed impossibly wide.

"Seems everyone with a computer in the county had received e-mails with either jpegs or video clips attached. Thus, news of the giant whitetail's demise was a big deal, and it spread like wildfire," says Travis Hogan, the man who scored the rack for the BTR and whose story will soon appear in Rack magazine.

Colton's grandfather owns one of the three tracts where the buck was regularly seen, and that's where Colton and a college buddy were hunting when the season opened Dec. 1.

Toward the end of the very cold day, the two guys and Colton's brother staged a man-drive that pushed the buck out of hiding and into Colton's lap.

"I couldn't tell if it was THE buck or not, at first, because of all the trees," he said. "But then it stopped suddenly; probably scented me. That's when I saw the drop tines and knew.

"When he resumed walking, I shot," he added.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Is any buck worth a pint of blood, especially if it's extracted by mosquitoes?

Twelve-year-old Thomas Artall of Opelousas, La., doesn't think so. When the kid accompanied his dad, brother and uncle last January for their final hunt of the 2011-12 season, he doused himself liberally with insect repellent.

It might've been the dead of winter, but that can sometimes mean temperatures in the upper 60s or even 70s in St. Landry Parish.

"Sunday, the last day of gun season, was supposed to be hot and humid," the boy said. "When Dad got up, we gathered our gear and headed out for some family land we've hunted for many years."

Accompanying Thomas and his dad, Patrick, were his older brother, Nickolas, and their Uncle Jeffrey. Thomas' stand, an 8-foot-high homemade one, was the closest to the field where they parked.

"My dad waited until I was inside, and then he handed me my .30-06," Thomas said. "I had a pretty good view of a nearby field, the edge of the woods and the trail."

Patrick's stand was about 500 yards distant.

"Just as it was breaking daylight around 7:00, I heard something walking in the woods right in front of me, but I couldn't see it, at first. Eventually, I made out the back end of a deer.

"I couldn't really see over the shooting rail without standing up, and I didn't want to scare it off, so I bent down and looked under the rail ... and saw a rack," he added.

When Thomas first trained his scope on the buck a mere 20 yards away, he couldn't see it. He had to crank it down with his left hand.

"When I found the deer in the crosshairs, I turned (the scope) back up and shot," he said.

Patrick arrived an hour later, and Thomas gestured him over to where he'd last seen the buck.

[Read the rest of this article...]

That little picture next to the word “snakebit” in your dictionary is Ricky Sullivan of Meridian, Miss., although he’s sure to be replaced by another deer hunter when the next edition is published.

Ricky’s visage was added to the big red book in 2010 when he missed a buck he and a buddy had nicknamed Pea Vine, one of the finest whitetails ever to roam Lauderdale County. The deer got its name from the first trail cam mugshot that revealed a rack so strange that Ricky couldn’t tell, at first, whether he was looking at bone or vines from the peas it liked to eat.

On the last Friday of the 2010 season, Ricky shot over the buck’s back. He missed it again during the 2011 Christmas break, which he blames on an unseen sapling.

Ricky again had Pea Vine in his sights in January, but he decided not to take the neck shot.

“He was only 100 yards away, but the shot was just too iffy,” he said.

The next time they crossed paths, it was a tad too late to shoot.

With only five days remaining in the season, Ricky grew desperate and decided to burn some vacation time. He planned to hunt from dawn ‘til dusk every day until the closing bell sounded.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Jeff Essary was already driving to his deer hunting spot along Missouri’s St. Francis River when a friend, Chris Wilson, called to ask which stand he was planning to use.

“I told him, ‘The two-man stand. Why? Where would you hunt?’” Jeff said.

Chris thought the “welded stand” would be a better choice. The first one Jeff had ever built, it needed some shoring up, but it was still solid enough to support a Missouri duck hunter who’d decided to trade his shotgun and steel shot for a smokepole and single bullet.

Jeff went there instead, and Chris might never let him forget that it was his idea.

Dec. 21 was cool and overcast, and a gentle breeze was blowing out of the northwest. Jeff parked 300 yards east of the welded stand, pulled on his hunting clothes and sprayed himself  with a cover scent, and then followed a bush-hogged path to the stand that had seen better days.

[Read the rest of this article...]