Steve Woods with the mount of the Jackson County buck that he took last season. Photo by Anthony Campbell.

Jackson County, in the northeastern corner of the Cotton State, has a long history of producing top-end whitetails. Glance at one of the old Alabama Whitetail Record books and you’ll see that this county has consistently ranked near the top in the number of record-class bucks produced.

In recent years, talk occasionally has it that Jackson County isn’t what it once was -- that the salad days for big-time bucks are long past for this particular county. To those critics, Steve Woods might say, “Wait just a minute.”

Woods, a lifelong resident of Jackson County, has taken plenty of garden-variety 6- and 8-pointers over the span of his 30-odd years spent chasing whitetails in his home county. But the truly big buck always eluded him -- until last December: Hunting just 300 yards behind his house on that fateful Saturday morning on the eighth day of the month, the 45-year-old deerslayer downed a 13-point whitetail that sported a rack grossing just over 160 Boone and Crockett Club points.

What makes the buck particularly interesting -- its enormous size aside -- is its whereabouts when Woods found it: not at Stevenson, or Paint Rock, or Skyline, or any of those other locales so much celebrated for big bucks over the years, but in Pisgah, a sleeper area for trophy deer. Even Woods admits that it’s not one of the places he usually hunts.

“My brother Lamar has always killed the big bucks,” Woods stated. “I usually hunt with him. We usually go to a more remote area off the side of the mountain. This was not a place I normally hunt.”

The Woods brothers belong to none of the many hunting clubs that dot Jackson County, and shy away from nearby Martin-Skyline Wildlife Management Area, its 45,000 acres the most popular -- and most trodden -- hunting destination in the area. They usually go afield on family-owned land.

Behind Steve Woods’ house is a cutover owned by his uncle -- and it was almost an accident that Woods ended up hunting there. “I walked in there on Friday and saw a couple of bushes that had been rubbed by a buck,” the hunter said. Woods had killed a 6-pointer in the same general area several seasons earlier. The rubs that he was seeing weren’t particularly impressive, and he assumed that their maker was just another smallish buck using the area. Still, he decided to set up his tree stand and try for the deer, since it was so close to home.

“I put up my stand on Friday for the Saturday hunt,” he said.

When Woods awoke that morning, it seemed like anything but a good day for deer hunting. “It was 65 degrees, misting rain and foggy,” he recalled. “The wind was blowing so it would hit me on my right side, and I thought it really might blow my scent towards the area I expected the deer to come from.”

The hunter’s problems seemed to be compounded by the fact that the tree he’d hung his stand in had a limb that prevented him from climbing higher than 14 feet. “I had meant to go back and cut that limb, but I forgot about it,” he admitted. And not being able to climb any higher meant a large cedar tree would block his view.

“I looked up about 7:30 and here he came,” Woods said. “He was just walking with his head down like he was in another world.”

Because of the cedar blocking his line of sight, the hunter didn’t see the buck until it was only 20 yards away. “There aren’t many trees in that cutover, and the one I was in was really the only choice,” he said. “You couldn’t get back off the trail as much as you would have liked.”