The Martin-Skyline Wildlife Management Area in Jackson County is a place notoriously tough for killing a buck -- but don't tell that to 9-year-old twins Cord and Cade Mason!

Incredible as it might seem, each of the boys -- the sons of Rick and Katrina Mason of Guntersville -- killed 8-pointers at Skyline within an hour of daybreak on opening day of the 2005-06 deer season! Cord tagged his buck at about 6:30, and then Cade connected around 7:30. The two were afield with their dad and uncle, Edwin Mason, when they got the bucks.

For the price of a $16 WMA hunting license, Skyline offers access to more than 40,000 acres of public hunting ground. Since it's close to the large population center of Huntsville, it feels significant hunting pressure, especially early in the season. Area managers schedule several weekends of gun hunting each season, and the Masons, who've been hunting there for years, try to make several of the sessions each year. In this instance, pressure may have actually played to their advantage -- but that prospect wasn't readily evident early that morning.

Indeed, the day started out somewhat unpromisingly for the family group of hunters. On top of it being the opener, Skyline was coincidentally staging an either-sex hunt that day, and the combo had apparently drawn a big crowd. "When we got to the checking station to get our permits, more than 300 people had signed in ahead of us," Edwin recalled. "We were grumbling -- we thought it was going to be so crowded we wouldn't have a place to sit." And as two different check stations are present at the WMA, the Masons were really seeing only half the mob.

They had a really good idea of where they wanted to go within the area, since the uncle was a member of the private Carter Hunting Club, which had formerly leased land now contained within the WMA's Walls of Jericho tract.

The Masons like to set up on an particular oak flat adjacent to a cutover; according to Edwin, the site's only about 300 yards off the blacktop of State Route 79-N, a major road that divides the Jericho tract. Despite all the other hunters afield that day, no one was in their spot when they got there, because many of the other hunters were going deeper into the heart of the WMA. That apparently was a major factor favoring the Masons' choice of location.

"We could see the lights of 4-wheelers in the distance," Edwin said. "People were bailing off the mountain on ATVs everywhere. I think that someone probably spooked these bucks and ran them to us."

Once on the flat, the group split up, Rick and Cord taking one spot, Edwin and Cade another. "We were probably only about 150 yards apart," reported Edwin. They were sitting on the ground, not high in the tree stands that so many hunters like to use nowadays.

Cade is a big, strapping boy, even though he's only 9 years old -- and he was using a big gun for his age: He knocked the buck down with his daddy's .30-06. "The buck Cade shot just came walking up beside us and stopped," Edwin recalled. And less than an hour later, Cord, armed with a .30-30 got his 8-pointer. The party dragged the two deer out of the woods and loaded them in the back of the truck for the ride home.