The Bucks Are Bigger in Texas

June 17, 2020 Hunting,SCA Articles

Situated in the heart of Texas’ Comanche territory, the luxurious JL Bar Ranch produces giant whitetails.

Sonora, Texas, on the far western edge of the lovely rolling Hill Country. It’s the town where Will “News” Carver of the infamous Butch Cassidy Wild Bunch gang was – depending on which account you choose to believe – either ambushed or killed in a shootout by the sheriff and his deputies for a murder he never committed, though I think we can safely assume “News” probably had other murders on his conscience.

This was once the heart of Comanche territory. Quanah Parker, last and greatest of the Comanche chiefs, stole a herd of horses only a few miles from Fort Concho, just a little north of Sonora on the site of present day San Angelo. And it was from Fort Concho that Brigadier General Ranald Slidell Mackenzie marched out for his last major engagement against the Comanche and Quanah Parker, successfully putting an end to the decades-long resistance of the greatest tribe of horsemen and warriors the world has ever known, a tribe that had brought the might of the United States government and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny to a complete standstill for nearly 40 years.

For all his military genius and success, Mackenzie is now almost completely forgotten, while George Armstrong Custer, who graduated last in his class at West Point, and was defeated and killed largely because of his own arrogance and stupidity and ambition, is remembered as a great American hero.

There is a lesson there, somewhere.

Both General Mackenzie and Quanah Parker would be a little stunned if they could return to Sonora today. The buffalo are gone, replaced by species like axis, blackbuck, fallow and sika, and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a white-tailed deer. And not just any old whitetail. Today, some of the largest whitetails to be found anywhere are found in Texas.

Sonora Trophy Hunts on the JL Bar Ranch consists of more than 12,000 acres of both high- and low-fence hunting. Like practically every ranch in Texas over a half acre in size, they run black angus, but the focus is on deer: deer hunting, deer management, deer study and deer breeding.

If you are unfamiliar with it, deer breeding is a big business in Texas and, like everything else in Texas, they don’t do it by halves. The artificial insemination barn is more high-tech, organized and cleaner than most hospitals. Mounts of famous breeder bucks hang just inside the front door, bucks that were so famous in their day that they had names: Pancho, Lefty, Moose, Franco. The pens where the bucks and breeder does are kept are large, sprawling affairs surrounded by sturdy fencing to keep out the occasional mountain lion and the ubiquitous bobcats.

Driving slowly by with ranch manager Scott Jacoby, he pointed out two-year-old bucks that were the offspring of famous sires, two-year-olds that in any other part of the country would be shot immediately as the trophy of a lifetime, which of course leads to the question of age as a factor in trophy management.

The three factors that control antler size are genetics, nutrition and age. Tamper with any one of those and antler size will decrease. At the JL Bar, five is the minimum age at which a buck may be shot, and bucks that reach that age learn a trick or two in the fine art of survival.

I sat in a blind over a feeder on my first morning and I saw bucks that would have qualified as trophies anywhere, many of them, but all were under five. In the distance, moving through the brush, keeping live oaks and mesquite trees between him and us at all times, my guide and I saw glimpses of something huge: parts of a massive body; a main beam as big around as my forearm; gleaming ivory points. What we never saw was the whole animal. The same thing happened to us that evening at a different blind and again the next morning at a third blind, at which point I decide to glass and stalk.

My guide, a young man named Heath with an artistic streak he needs to nurture (he showed me some of his drawings of deer, and the kid’s got talent), and I walked and stalked at first and found a beautiful ten-point, but he stayed in the shade and Heath was reluctant to take a chance without being able to age him accurately.

The next day, given the sheer size of the ranch, we elected to hunt African-style, driving and glassing. One of the other guides, Sam, joined us and we drove slowly along through pastures far larger than most Eastern or Midwestern farms. We saw sika deer, blackbucks, axis deer, young eight- and ten-point whitetails by the score, and again, something huge and heavy-beamed that melted back into the brush as we glassed it from a quarter-mile away.

It’s well known that the secret to finding giant bucks is either to hunt something else and not have a deer tag, or to give up and go back to the lodge for lunch. We were tooling merrily along, thinking fond thoughts about the lodge’s mistress of the kitchen, Benita, when both Sam and Heath screamed like girls at a rock concert.

Standing on the edge of the brush, surrounded by a harem of nubile does, was a Big Daddy. From my angle, all I could see was a huge body and half of a rack, but the half I saw was the kind men dream of. Even after I slipped out of the truck and sneaked back to a spot with a clear shot at the body, half his head was still hidden to me, and I wanted confirmation.

“Psst! Heath, talk to me.”

In unison, both men hissed, “For God’s sake, shoot!”

And of course at that moment, a doe stepped in front of the buck. There was nothing to do but pray Big Daddy wouldn’t decide to move. He and the doe had a brief conversation and then she moved on, and I touched the trigger.

I was shooting a new Weatherby Mark V Ultra Lightweight Range Certified rifle. This is a 6.75-pound, fluted-barrel version of their 8.75-pound standard Mark V. It has the same 26-inch barrel, and the same sub-MOA accuracy you expect with all Weatherby rifles, but the lighter weight makes it a pleasure to schlep around.

I am no fan of unnecessary recoil, and I had been concerned that the missing three pounds might make for an unpleasant shooting experience. Not an unpleasant hunting experience (there is no recoil when you’re looking through your scope at the trophy of a lifetime), but unpleasant at the range. As it turned out I had more range time than anticipated, thanks to the tender mercies of the airlines. I wasn’t even on the paper at a hundred yards initially, and I had to go back to 50 yards and start all over again, so I can say honestly that recoil was never an issue.

The buck humped up and moved back into the brush. In two steps he had vanished. We sat and waited to give him time to settle and my heart time to return to normal. As it turned out, my heart took longer than he did. We found him within ten feet of where he disappeared.