The '98 Thanksgiving season was spent in the company of my family in the small town of Clyde, TX. While I was a bit upset that I had left my favorite whitetail deer hunting grounds of Northeastern Oklahoma behind, I was content with the recent trophy buck I had taken while bowhunting during gun season. Despite my continuous desire to be whitetail hunting, I was tagged out until bowhunting came back in. 

Fourteen years ago, I had taken my first whitetail deer while hunting with the same uncle whose house I shared for Thanksgiving this year. Being a hunting family, we sat in the warm Texas sun after the big dinner and talked of success and failure that we had experienced over the years. 

Through these same years, my uncle has taken enough bucks to line antlers, "from here to thet ol' country store yonder," and as he told me stories of the big trophy deer he had been seeing this year, I persuaded him to wake me one morning and show me his grounds.

So early Saturday morning, my uncle shined a flashlight in my sleep-filled eyes and I jumped from the bed to throw on some clothes and meet him at the truck. The November morning was cool but the southern wind carried stories from the Gulf that told of warmer temperatures. I sat quietly in the truck and watched my uncle's hand resting lightly on the scoped rifle in the seat next to him. My uncle had never been much of a bowhunter. "One of these days," he had said once, "you'll get tired of watching those bucks go by just out of range and you'll pick up a rifle again." 

Daybreak found us sitting in a field under a small mesquite tree staring across a pond to a small rise. Whitetail deer appeared as slowly and yet suddenly as daylight and we watched several doe feeding amongst the Texas cactus. As the morning wore on, my uncle grew restless and eventually rose. I sensed that he wanted to show me some bucks and would sacrifice his hunt to take me to a better vantage point. I followed his small back, covered by gray and navy flannel, his jeans rustling lightly as he walked. Earlier, when I had asked him for some camouflage, he had told me "There ain't no need for that." 

At another vantage point we spotted two monster whitetail bucks walking the pond dam near which we had been sitting. While the earlier shot would have been only 100 yards, it was now over 500, and too far for the 22-250 my uncle carried slung over his shoulder. We watched the bucks as they crested the hill and fed on top, their bodies silhouetted against the morning sky. They had "a spread you could lay a highway through," my uncle said in later stories. 

Eventually, they disappeared over the hill and I was left to listen to my uncle cussing himself for leaving our previous spot.

Soon, we were moving again. Then, on the edge of the mesquite, there was motion. My uncle stopped and I looked with him at a very nice non-typical trophy buck, larger than any buck I have ever taken, picking its way through the fallen mesquite and cactus. It stopped to look at us, but at over 400 yards, the buck was unconcerned with our presence. We stood still, facing down the buck for a while before he turned and began moving slowly away from us. My uncle turned to me

"You want to shoot him?" he asked. 

"No," I said. "I don't have a license." My uncle held out the rifle anyway and I looked at it and back to the mesquite where the buck was weaving around the brush. 

"Naw," I repeated, still fighting my decision. 

My uncle leaned over and put a distant mesquite between himself and the buck. He proceeded slowly across the barren ground, working his way toward the draw into which the buck was headed. I watched my uncle moving slowly closer to the buck now covered by the slipping hillside. 100 yards further, my uncle stopped and I watched him through my binoculars as he searched for the buck. He neared a mesquite tree and raised the rifle and steadied it against the twisting trunk. There was a crack and I could hear the bullet whistling through the air, the Texas wind catching the sound and carrying it back to me. There was a long, continuous hiss and then a pop and my uncle, framed within my binoculars turned and waved for me to come up.

We paced the shot at 320 yards. He had shot the buck in the neck because "I don't like them body shots, they mess up all the meat."

The buck was a beautiful, heavy 8-point non-typical. His left antler actually had two main beams. One, a large spike extending 15 inches upward, and the second, a more typical beam carrying a brow tine and a second tine. We were impressed with the strange rack as we dressed the deer on the Texas desert. By 9:30, we had deposited the buck in the bed of his truck and were headed home. 

We were laughing and talking good-heartedly as we drove home, but my mind drifted from the conversation and I replayed the morning events in my mind. At the end of it all, something was missing.

Most of our family were awake and sitting on the front porch as we returned. My girlfriend approached the truck and asked me, "Did you go hunting this morning?" I smiled and said something that didn't really matter as everyone looked into the back of the truck and were amazed at the lifeless form of the buck therein. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I was asking myself the same question.

Author's Note: This story was written in 1998, two years after I had graduated from college. At the time, I had only killed 2 bucks in my young hunting life, and I was immersed in a phase which I can only describe as "The Archery Snob." I continue to grow and evolve as a hunter, and while I still maintain an "archery only" approach to my big game hunting, there is a much greater appreciation for all walks of hunting. Now I laugh at my snobbery when I read this story, but I still like the story. It accurately captures a style of hunting in the Texas mesquite. These days I have a much greater understanding of my uncle's ability to accurately attempt and make an off-hand neck shot on a whitetail at over 320 paces. Thankfully I was wise enough to keep my mouth shut to hide my ignorance at the time.