“I counted the points while I talked to Doug,” Keith grinned. “When I got to 7, he said, ‘Is it a 7-pointer?’ and I said, ‘No -- that’s just one side!’”

The landowner helped Beasley load the buck up, and the victorious hunter then drove it around in his pickup truck showing it off. “I’ll bet 300 or 400 people saw it,” he said.

The Scottsboro Sentinel newspaper also published a photo of the deer. After the hoopla died down, a few days remained of the season, so Beasley returned to the woods. “I wasn’t really hunting hard,” he said. “I was satisfied with the three deer I’d taken, and I was just going back to enjoy the woods and close out the season.”

He ended up killing another 7-pointer -- dropping it at about 230 yards -- to round out his incredible year. “The only regret I have is that I only got to see the big buck for three or four seconds before I shot him,” Keith concluded. “It’s the biggest deer I’ve ever seen in the woods and I would have liked to have watched him for a few minutes.”

SID PUGH’S 150-INCHER
Huntsville’s Sid Pugh and his brother Jack have been hunting together for years, and shared many a fine day in the outdoors. But they’ve never had a streak of luck like the one that befell them around New Year’s last season.

Pugh bought some hunting land in Tennessee a while back, and the brothers went there to try their luck on Dec. 30; Jack ended up shooting a gorgeous 9-pointer on that trip. While they were trailing that buck, the brothers jumped another deer and shot it, thinking that it was Jack’s buck. It turned out to be a totally different whitetail, this one sporting a 6-point rack.

“We let smaller bucks pass and we probably wouldn’t have shot this deer if it had just come by us,” Pugh explained. “But it jumped up and was running away from us and we really thought it was Jack’s buck.”

The brothers were feeling pretty good about the start to their season when they came back to Alabama. In fact, they went hunting the next day on a Madison County farm they have permission to hunt. Jack scored again, dropping a nice 8-pointer after seeing seven bucks together in a farm field.

It was by then clear that Lady Luck was sharing the stand with the brothers. So, naturally, they went back the next day, taking Sid’s son Ben with them. “We put Ben in the field where we’d been seeing so many deer,” Pugh said, “hoping he would get a shot.”

It turned out that no good trees to climb grew near the field in which Pugh had decided to set up, so he instead sat in a lawn chair on the ground in the treeline.

As many as 30 deer had been seen previously in the field Ben was watching, but none materialized on New Year’s Day. “I was the only one who saw a deer,” Pugh noted. “It was getting late. There wasn’t a lot of shooting light left when he stepped out.”

Pugh looked through his binoculars at the deer moving into the field and knew immediately that it was a shooter. “I got on the radio and told the guys I was looking at a big buck and I was taking the shot,” Pugh said.

He stood up to get a better shot, and then dropped the buck with a well-placed shot from his .30-06. “My brother had passed up this very same deer a couple years earlier when he was just an 8-point,” Pugh pointed out, adding, “The buck wasn’t chasing a doe or anything like that, but he was making a scrape when I shot.”

The field where he shot the deer wasn’t a greenfield, or even a crop field of the type ordinarily associated with deer, but a cotton field. “Grass and weeds grow up naturally in these fields after the cotton is picked and deer come out in them to feed on the natural forage,” Pugh explained.

The 10-pointer was the best buck in a lifetime of hunting for the Huntsville real estate agent. “My brother is a police officer and because of our work schedules, we don’t get to hunt a lot,” Pugh noted. “We felt that we had done very, very well for no more time than we could put into it.”

The big 10-pointer was the best deer of the season for the brothers, but he wasn’t their final buck of 2006-07: On Jan. 12, Jack went back to the farm and bagged his best buck ever, a 140-class 8-pointer. “We’d taken five bucks from Dec. 30 to Jan. 12,” Pugh said.

As it happens, the brothers had been in a trophy-hunting club in Macon County prior to their incredible run in Tennessee and Madison County. “We took some nice deer down there, but we never saw bucks like the ones we got last year up here,” stated Pugh.

Pugh can’t help but believe that his and Jack’s habit of passing up smaller bucks helped him to nail the big one. “We’re trying to shoot only 8s and better on my place in Tennessee,” he said.

The brothers won’t be hunting in Macon County this year, however: The landowner went up on the lease, and they threw in the towel. “If we’d been getting bucks like the ones we got up here, we probably would have paid to get in it again,” Pugh remarked laconically.

Find more about Alabama fishing and hunting at: AlabamaGameandFish.com