"He was running flat out," said the 37-year-old farmer, "like somebody had spooked him. Either that, or he realized that he'd been caught in the open after sunup."

The buck was at almost 300 yards before it crossed the path that Gibson had taken to get to his stand. And as soon as the panicked deer's nostrils filled with man-scent, it veered sharply - changing course so that Ricky would have just one opportunity to stop it.

Knowing that it was a long shot, but his only one, Gibson leveled his rifle and squeezed off a round. The buck fell, but it regained its footing immediately and managed to jump a fence and disappear onto the neighbor's property. After getting the landowner's permission and a tracking dog, he found his prize. The rack on that monster grossed 185 7/8 inches of antler.

In fact, a check of the most recent edition of Alabama Whitetail Records reveals 1,034 entries from throughout the state. Yet, only four of those came from Covington County. Besides Ricky Gibson's monster, the other three entries were all archery kills. The most recent of these was an 8-point buck arrowed by Kenneth Eisele in 1996. That rack had a gross measurement of 119 6/8 inches.

A season earlier in 1995 Craig Harrison also got an 8-pointer on a bowhunt in the county. That deer's rack grossed 116 7/8 inches.

Clayton Wood took the final of the three bucks, making his kill in 1994. His 9-pointer had a 4x5 rack that grossed 116 1/8 inches.

As noted, all of these scores are before deductions, which is how deer are accepted for the Alabama Whitetail Records book.

The main reason for the lack of quality racks from Covington County is simply its geography. Located between Escambia and Geneva counties, jammed in against the Florida state border, Covington is as far south as you can get in southeast Alabama. This is a region of sandy soils that hold relatively few nutrients; thus both the body and antler size of bucks suffer.

On the other hand, as noted earlier, this is a region that produces lots of deer. Also, the county is blessed with a wealth of public hunting lands. About two-thirds of the Conecuh National Forest's 83,083 acres of land are located in the southwest quadrant of the county. Of these U.S. Forest Service lands, 23,370 acres are managed by the Alabama Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries as the Blue Spring Wildlife Management Area. Virtually all of the Forest Service land offers deer hunting for archers, primitive-weapons fans and hunters using modern firearms.

Also in this region is the Covington WMA, located to the east of the national forest and abutting Geneva County. This tract of state-owned land covers 22,490 acres and also provides deer-hunting options.

Blue Spring and Covington WMAs consistently rank among the top 5 in the state for the number of deer they give up. In recent years, they have each yielded between 250 and 300 animals to hunters. Blue Spring has an area where hunting deer with dogs is allowed and it generally is tops among all the public tracts in the Cotton State for yielding deer to dog-hunters.

For more information on these two wildlife management areas or for the hunting regulations in Covington County, visit the Web site of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, at www.dcnr.state.al.us.

Click the link for Hunting and then follow the prompt for Seasons & Bag Limits for the hunting regulations. For WMA information, follow the prompts for Where To Hunt and then Wildlife Management Areas.