After three years of losing a game of hide and seek with an incredible buck he'd seen in 2010, Thomas Waters decided the only remaining option was to hunt the one piece of his friend's 570 acres he hadn't tried.
The hunter from Mobile, Alabama, had two open weekends during the 2013-14 season, so he set out a trail camera to reconnoiter that part of his friend's Lowndes County cattle ranch.
He was thrilled when the camera yielded some nighttime photographs of the distinctive buck, even more so because he was the only person hunting the land.
When Thomas went to the woods on Jan. 13, he followed a bush-hogged path skirting the edge of a pine plantation. When he neared the place he'd decided to leave his climber, he spotted three does.
He sat beside the path for about an hour, until they vanished, and then hurried to hang his stand on a suitable tree. He didn't hunt then, but he returned and scaled the tree at 3:30 p.m.
Fifteen minutes later, the big buck he'd seen four years earlier walked out of the shadows and into the bush-hogged lane at about 225 yards. The deer then walked to within 125 yards and turned broadside, ready to cut back into the woods.
Thomas grunted to prevent that from happening. And when the deer turned and looked away from him, he squeezed the trigger.
Thomas says the whitetail jumped about 7 feet in the air and landed on its stomach. When it regained its feet, he shot twice more.
"My emotions were a mess as I sat beside that monstrous buck," he told John Phillips, who penned his story for Rack magazine. "It was the biggest deer I'd ever seen, alive or dead, or even dreamed about taking."
Twenty-three of the 29 points are irregular, meaning the rack is a mainframe 3x3. With a BTR composite score of 202 4/8 inches, it's the second largest ever recorded from Lowndes County.