The Texas panhandle property that we have hunted for the last 14 years is really diverse. The landscape consists of dry creek beds with sparse trees, sand hills, and the flats are irrigated farm land. As the 2007 archery deer season approached, my hopes were up of seeing a truly big buck. This region is not known for monster mule deer and during the past five years, I’ve let the mature 4x4’s walk, settling for mature management bucks to help the gene pool.

With three days left in the archery season, I decided to sneak away from work and try a morning hunt. On the pre-dawn drive, the weather report for the day was a high of 72 degrees, winds of 20-30 mph with possible 55 mph gust. Not the ideal conditions but it was my last chance to hunt the archery season.

I took a ranch road to some nearby sand hills and stopped a quarter mile short of a sunflower field. After pulling out my spotting scope, I quickly found four does and a small buck. As these deer entered the field, a lone buck stood up a little ways from them that made my heart stop. After 14 years, it was the dream buck I had been searching for! The group of deer turned and headed for the sand hills as the big buck walked deeper in to the field and lay down. The wind was wrong for a stalk so I drove three miles around in order to come in downwind from him. After a few minutes, I was able to locate the top of his rack and after lining up some landmarks, I set out after the biggest buck of my life.

I circled in a wide loop to come in on him. However, after being unable to find him, I started getting nervous. By my landmarks, I knew he was close so I went to my knees and began picking the field apart with my binoculars. Suddenly, the awesome buck stood up 100 yards away. He had no idea anything was wrong as he slowly angled away from me before lying down again. The distance was about 150 yards so I started a steady crawl toward him in the crosswind. At this point it was painfully slow. I moved every dry leave out of the way and bent every sunflower stalk to the side as I moved forward. Finally, at 27 yards, I held up in a slight opening where drawing my bow would be possible without interference. I slowly put an arrow on the string and rolled up to my knees and sat on my heels. My heart raced as all I could see were his antlers! Too nervous to try anything else, I made the decision to wait him out. After about an hour to an hour and a half, a strong gust of wind blew the arrow off my rest. As I began to put it back on, the buck started to stand. As I rose up and drew the bow, he turned his head toward me. The bottom third of his body was hidden by the sunflowers but the main problem was the strong cross wind. It was blowing my sight picture from the front of his shoulder to his guts. With no time to waist, I pushed hard on the bow and let the arrow fly as the pin came past his shoulder.

Twenty minutes later, I was standing over my dream buck––an 8x7 that unofficially gross scores 224 1/8! He will be officially scored after the 60 day drying period and will be the highest scoring mule deer ever taken with archery equipment in the state!