“It was different to hunt with a cameraman,” he confided. “I felt the pressure a little bit. But my cameraman, Gene Price, was great.”

The experience was so good that Hall has made plans to return to Ohio with his dad this season.

With the out-of-state buck under his belt, it was time for Hall to get serious about the hunting closer to home. It didn’t take very long for him to break the ice.

“My first gun hunt was the Saturday after Thanksgiving,” the hunter recalled. “It was exactly seven days after I got the 10-pointer in Ohio and I got an 8-pointer at the club.”

His club is supposed to take 50 does a year as part of its management plan. Hall saw four does that morning, watched them a long time and finally decided to take one. He downed one with his new Browning 7mm Magnum.

“I still get excited about taking any deer, even a doe,” he admitted. “And I always tell people to take their time and enjoy the moment.”

Hall was still up his tree doing just that when four bucks came out of cover and ran a ridgeline about 175 yards away. “I picked out what I thought was the biggest one and I got him as well,” he said.

It was a new season, with a new gun, and Hall already had two deer down. He recovered the doe fairly quickly, but called his father to help him find the buck. His dad saw the deer as he was riding to the scene on his 4-wheeler, but didn’t let on; rather, he let his son wallow in the suspense.

The “heart-attack hill” on which Stephen Hall was hunting required a nearly seven-mile 4-wheeler ride just to get there and then a lengthy walk -- no easy place to hunt by any means. “If you get a deer there, you’re going to work,” said Hall.

He was to strike again in the same area about a month later. Hall works in the mail department for Alabama Power Company and, just as at the U.S. Post Office, the weeks leading up to Christmas were stressful ones. He went to hunt his honeyhole on Christmas Eve morning, knowing that it would be just a morning hunt before he headed home for Christmas festivities. Still, he was happy to be away from the pressures of his job and heading to the woods.

“I told my wife, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if I got a big buck on Christmas Eve?’” he ecalled. “I don’t know what prompted me to say that.”

But it was exactly what happened. He downed an 11-pointer as an early Christmas present to himself! And, once again, his dad was there with him to share the moment.

Hall was having a great season -- but it wasn’t over yet. His last buck of the season fell on Jan. 6 after a dramatic hunt. The buck was a 7-pointer with long tines. “I don’t know that the deer were actually in rut,” he stated, “but they were getting itchy.”

A finger of woods to his back, Hall was watching a clearcut. He was using a grunt call when he saw a racked buck working its way through thick woods behind him. The buck finally got in the clear and Hall was able to take a shot -- and nothing happened. He had missed! The buck bounded back into the cover.