Rock N' Roll By Jeff Thaxton

What a weekend! My band “Thaxton” is a hard-alternative band based out of Dallas, Texas, and we’d played a showcase in front of several record labels on a Saturday night. We’d been looking forward to the show for some time and weren’t disappointed with the results. The place had been packed and the crowd had responded very well. As a band we were very pleased with our performance, but now we had to wait on the business side of the music industry. I was pumped with adrenaline from the show, but for some reason I couldn’t suppress the thought of hunting—and Sunday was the last day of the Texas mule deer season.
The next morning I loaded up and made the drive to Childress. With the sun shining, I finally arrived at the low-fenced E.B. & D. Ranch. It’s a great ranch that I’ve been lucky enough to hunt, taking some nice free-ranging whitetails scoring in the 140s and 150s. To my surprise I had the place to myself, and that was all the incentive I needed. I raced to my stand.

Once situated, a quick survey of the surroundings helped calm me down enough to enjoy the time in the outdoors. The air was cool, the sky was clear—it was simply a beautiful day for hunting. And I had hopes for a good hunt, too. Even though he’d been caught on film only twice in two months, a very tall-racked mulie buck had been captured on my trail camera. The pictures showed he had deep forks, a big body, and the biggest rack of all the bucks my camera had captured. His only weakness was his spread, but he still looked to be a 160- to 170-class buck. This was the buck I wanted, but I did have one concern in addition to the infrequency with which he’d been caught by the trail cam. One picture showed him with a heavily muscled buck. That buck was mature, though he displayed a much inferior rack. And I had many pictures of this second buck, enough I was afraid he might be dominant and have driven my tall-racked buck out of the area.
These thoughts were going through my mind, when a lone doe came in to feed. I glassed the brush around her and my stand, but I couldn’t make the mesquite trees turn into bucks. After she left, I figured the buck probably wouldn’t show up and I was going to need to get more aggressive if something was going to happen. Too, it was the last day of the season and I had nothing to lose.

Leaving my stand, I climbed a nearby hill for vantage and started to glass a vast area. A deer was quickly revealed on the top of a distant knoll. A mule deer doe. Seeing nothing else by her, I started glassing other likely brush pockets and openings. Nothing. I took a look back over at the doe to see her walking off the hill—and coming up behind her was a huge buck. They were about 600 yards away, so I grabbed my gear and bailed off the hill, running to cut the distance in half while I was out of their view.

Topping out on a small rise, I soon found the buck, but he was following the doe into a draw and quickly moving out of sight. It was time to sneak in and intercept them, but as I moved forward again, a small buck appeared on the hill. He looked my way, but then turned to gaze in the direction where my buck and his doe had gone. That gave me the green light, and I managed to get brush between me and this second buck to carefully close more ground—until I noticed a mulie doe feeding about 40 yards to my left. I tried to wait her out, but she wouldn’t budge. What to do? Figuring I was somewhere between her and where I believed my buck was, seemed the only option was to continue the stalk, hoping that, if the doe busted, she’d spook past me and not toward the buck.

Well, deer never want to play by my game plan. She spooked alright, right to the other deer. But rather quickly, she settled down, and none of the other deer appeared to have been spooked by her, as nothing had blown out of the draw. Maybe I still had a chance.

I watched the spooked doe for a moment, then looked up to see the small buck still standing on the hill, still staring in the direction my buck had gone. I stared easing through the brush again.

There he was, and what a buck! He was quartering away, barely visible beyond a small rise between us. He didn’t know I was there, and I took the opportunity to quickly range him at 159 yards. Setting up on the shooting sticks, I had to wait out my second dose of adrenaline that weekend; my crosshairs danced all over the place. Deep breaths and mental notes to calm down didn’t seem to relieve the buck fever much, but eventually the sight picture looked right, and I touched off the Remington 7mm Ultra Mag.

When I finally got across the drainage to the buck, I recognized the tall rack with the deep forks. It was the trail cam buck.

Unfortunately, the adrenaline wore off way too quickly dragging the big buck out of the draw. Reaching an area where I could bring my truck in, I had to just lay there for a few minutes and reflect on the events that had just transpired, and then I got out my camera phone so I could send pictures to my wife. She soon called with the simple comment, “Really?”—she’s used to me going hunting and not shooting anything 90% of the time. Yet this last minute, impromptu hunt had just yielded my biggest buck.

Back at camp it was more physical labor getting the buck on the scales by myself, but I finally got him weighed: 175 pounds field dressed. The Texas Big Game Awards official score came to 1641⁄4, with a net score of 1581⁄2. His tallest tines were 145⁄8 and 134⁄8. His spread was just 173⁄8, but that just proves that most of a deer’s score comes from tine length.

I want to give thanks to my wife for putting up with me playing in a hard rock band and being a hunter, to God for the opportunity to enjoy his creations, and to Bary Saladino and Eddie Watson for allowing me hunt their ranch. What a weekend! Now if my band could get a good record contract, you know, one with time off for deer season.