"Daddy, are you going to shoot?" the boy asked.
John Trammell had told 5-year-old Cooper to be still, to be quiet and to put his fingers in his ears. They were sitting in a tripod stand overlooking a vast wheat field, father in the only seat and son on the platform at his feet.
"I'm going to shoot that deer," he'd warned.
The more John thought about the 350-yard shot, however, the less certain he became about making it. It looked too far, even magnified 16 times. It might've been a piece of cake another day, but not then. He was just too nervous.
"No, son. Let's go," he finally answered.
The hunter from Bentonia, Mississippi, suspected the buck was the 10-pointer he'd seen in one of his trail camera photographs. Even if it wasn't, it was the first decent whitetail he'd spotted since the 2014 season opened.
And he'd seen a lot of deer.
"After the soybeans were cut last year, I planted wheat," said John, who farms 450 acres in Yazoo County whenever he's not working at a nearby federal prison. "That wheat is like having a 200-acre food plot. The deer love it."
The big one joined some does in the field just before dark. Almost immediately, John told his son to be still and dialed up his scope to get a better look.
"I told my little boy, ‘You'd better be still. Daddy's about to shoot.' I was nervous, though. And while I was thinking about it, my son kept on asking ‘Daddy, are you going to shoot?'
"I didn't. I just chose to let him go," John said. "We left after that, and the deer never knew we were there."
John got another opportunity – solo and from 100 yards closer – nearly two weeks later on Christmas Eve. He won't forget that present for a while.
The buck is not only a state record among rifle kills, but it's also the largest Perfect ever recorded from Mississippi (by any means). Its BTR composite score is 183 2/8 inches.