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Life’s Good in Dellwood
By Mike Handley
Top of Florida’s Semi-Irregular list. Brandon Alday’s 4-year-old son, Hayes, nearly choked him when the yelling commenced. The boy was getting a free ride on his father’s shoulders when Brandon’s flashlight beam fell across the buck he was convinced he’d either missed or maimed. “I started screaming like a little... READ MORE
Why Leonard was Late for Church
By Ed Waite
Hunters on both sides of the Red River were gunning for this driftwood-wearing buck. This story is not about Leonard Ernst, but it might explain why he almost skipped Sunday morning services last Nov. 7. It most definitely accounts for the bare pew in Andy Anderson’s church. Andy didn’t intend to play hooky that day, but he had his hand... READ MORE
Down to the Wire
By Mike Handley
Two bullets, two years and two MONSTROUS bucks! Folks who fill their single buck tags on opening day might not complain, but, if they’re honest about it, they’d rather be in a stand than spend the remainder of deer season moping around the house or hunting vicariously with whispering television hunters. Tracy Atchison doesn’t have... READ MORE
Bullion Buck
By Mike Handley
Fort Knox Holds More Than Just Guns and Gold! Justin Corn hunts like there’s no tomorrow. The 24-year-old knows all about uncertainties. He joined the army after graduating high school in Clanton, Ala. He was in Iraq from 2007 through 2009, and he spent five months in Afghanistan last year before winding up at Fort Knox near Elizabethto... READ MORE
Unencumbered by Experience
By Mike Handley
A little girl’s intuition puts her on the other side of the crosshairs from her first buck. Brandon Hazel of Anthony, Kansas, knows when to say yes and close his mouth. While most dads would’ve listened to the voices in their own heads rather than the words of their 8-year-old kid, he allowed his daughter Joscelyn to choose where they s... READ MORE
Irony Tastes Like Venison
By Mike Handley
Just when any old buck (or doe) would’ve sufficed, along comes a deer with a headdress of tines ... Because of a foreboding weather forecast, heightened by bad luck at the onset of his planned weeklong hunt, Gary Fears headed afield on Nov. 24 with the resignation of shooting the first decent buck dumb enough to wander into his crosshairs. No... READ MORE
Clicking Heels
By Greg Hicks
Forget Yellow Bricks. The Road Out of Oz is Paved With Palmettos and Often Under Water. There’s no place like home.” Dorothy said it in “The Wizard of Oz” in 1939. Louisiana’s Ricky Caldwell spoke those same words on the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge in 2012. Ricky was born and raised not far from what would ev... READ MORE
Mirage and Mayhem
By Ed Waite
Lorain County rood-wad buck is No. 16 in a class filled with 200-inchers! It was as if the ground opened up and swallowed Kevin Fitch’s buck. One minute, it was on the receiving end of a shotgun slug (he hoped). The next, it was gone. Not fall-down-dead gone. Not running-with-the-wind-and-leaving-a-blood-trail gone. Just gone, leaving the hun... READ MORE
Shifting Priorities
By Jill J. Easton
Iowa hunter glad he hesitated to collect freezer meat. Deer hunting has always been more of a social affair for Randy Cantonwine and his landowner pals, who relish the camaraderie of hunting as a group. They hunt as a team, together but separately. Walkers slip through the timber to push the deer, while standers wait at strategic locations to inter... READ MORE
Peepless in Kansas
By Trevor Lumadue
The perfect hit doesn’t always leave the perfect trail. I returned from Iraq to Fort Riley, Kan., two years ago, just in time to buy a deer tag and jump into the second week of the 2009 archery season. I didn’t want to bumble into other guys’ well established honey holes, but I had no idea where to start. This meant I would be str... READ MORE
Daddy Sang Tenor
By Mike Handley
This Kentucky Hunter Discovers His Own So-You-Can-Rest Medicine. Michael Rothman knows cold. So convinced that, no matter how early his arrival, he was spooking deer out of a cornfield en route to his shooting house, the deer hunter from Bonnieville, Ky., decided to just spend the night in the box blind. It wasn’t as if there were a Scotty, a... READ MORE
The 13th Stand
By Marilyn Weber
With a half-hour of daylight remaining on the first Sunday in October 2008, Missouri archer Jim Shatto was about to draw on a 150-class whitetail. “As I readied my bow, the buck jerked up its head and stood perfectly still, staring into the bean field to its right,” Jim recalled. “I followed its gaze, and that’s when I spott... READ MORE
Twice Nocked on the Third Knock
By Mike Handley
Opportunity knocked three times in one evening before this Iowa bowhunter was able to put two arrows through one of 2008’s finest bucks. It took a couple of nocks, literally, but Steve Binkley of Lamoni, Iowa, received his Halloween treat four days early in 2008. Even after Steve’s first arrow drove home, the buck he shot on Oct. 27 too... READ MORE
Against All Odds
By Josh Root
Stolen equipment ruined his first spot, a turkey hunter his second … or so he thought! The 2009 Kansas deer season held a lot of promise. My trail cameras revealed a parade of exceptional bucks, and deer sign was everywhere! But a week before the opener, just when I could set my watch by the activity, all the deer disappeared. To make matter... READ MORE
The State Record that Never Was (Officially)
By Mike Handley
Fourteen years before the late David Melton shot the buck now recognized by Buckmasters and “Alabama Whitetail Records” as the largest deer ever felled in the Cotton State, a man from downriver in Belmont shot what would’ve been a state record — the one to beat — if records had been kept in 1942. Many people believe th... READ MORE
Hunt Hungry
By Mike Handley
While many hunters were out of the woods, stoking their own furnaces, Jerry Fitzgerald kept to his front-row seat at the whitetail matinee. It was straight-up 1:00 when Jerry Fitzgerald happened to glance into the alfalfa field — the last place most hunters would look during the middle of the day — to see a doe and a shooter buck step o... READ MORE
What Shortcoming?
By Mike Handley
Half-Buck has what it takes to shake up the records, as well as the man who tagged it! Mike McKinney doesn’t care if the buck he arrowed back in 2008 might’ve grunted in a higher pitch — eeerping instead of uuurping — or that it might’ve been only “half” interested in making scrapes and chasing does. Becaus... READ MORE
NUMBER 14
By Ed Waite
Ohio hunter derails deer train’s caboose. Donita Elder knows that blowing out candles takes a backseat to hunting. Her birthday falls on Oct. 30, when bucks are chasing does in Perry County, Ohio. She spent last year’s getting a makeover, a gift from her family, while hubby and the kids took to the woods. Daniel “DJ” Elder t... READ MORE
Rip Van Winkle Shoots Modern Day Legend
By Ed Waite
Thirty-six-year-old Brian Peters drives a dump truck for a living, hauling asphalt out of a plant in Byesville, Ohio. During the summer, he works long hours, usually seven-day weeks. There is little time for anything beyond work until the weather turns cold and most highway paving stops, and then he gets behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer and ha... READ MORE
.44 Mag as Dream Catcher
By Ed Waite
Does giveth, and they taketh away. Don Barbour of Mishawaka, Ind., is all too familiar with this bowhunter’s proverb. On the last afternoon of Indiana’s early archery season in 2010, he jumped a buck and a doe while walking to his stand. They’d been bedded in some tall grass before barreling through a briar patch and disappearing ... READ MORE