His camper is outfitted with a piece of plywood for a bed, covered by a foam mat and an Army sleeping bag. It’s rare that anyone beats him to the spot where he wants to go. He makes a point of being one of the very first hunters to check in on a gun hunt.

“I kill a lot of deer in the mornings, but I’ll sit all day on a gun hunt,” he said. “People like to walk around at lunch and it’s a good time to be up a tree.”

If he’s bowhunting early in the year, he doesn’t pull the all-day vigil until after Nov. 1, when he’s at Black Warrior. You can definitely see some pre-rut cruising at midday at that WMA, he noted.

Perry is meticulous about minimizing human odor. He wears a ScentLok suit and rubber boots and regularly sprays scent killer on himself while he’s hunting.

He rarely hunts the same stand two days in a row. If you want to maximize your hunting success, he said it’s important to hunt with all the different weapons -- bow, muzzleloader and rifle. Other than the Mauser 98, his weapons if choice are a Mathews Legacy bow and a Remington 700 .50 caliber inline muzzleloader. He hunts from an API Grand Slam Supreme tree stand, which he likes because it has a bar that surrounds the hunter. “I’m scared of heights,” he admitted. “I usually climb up in the dark so I can’t see down.”

Perry’s next goal for the future is getting his 14-year-old son Perry a buck. The boy just started hunting this year.

“We hunt out of the same tree, using two different climbing stands,” the father said.

For Michael Perry, going the extra mile is the difference in just hunting or succeeding.

“I put in a lot of time and effort,” Perry said. “It really means a lot to me that my brother Matt and I both have bucks now that make the Alabama Record Book.”

Matt is in the Army, stationed in Korea, and has not gotten to hunt in the last two seasons. But Michael is looking forward to the day when the two of them can once again roam Alabama’s public wild lands together in search of big bucks. l

Find more about Alabama fishing and hunting at: www.alabamagameandfish.com