"I came out almost exactly where I expected to," he said. "The buck was still there, and I had closed the distance to about 225 yards."

Coleman put his shooting sticks up, steadied for a shot, took a deep breath and squeezed of a shot. His gun is chambered in .264 Winchester Magnum, with handloads from his dad -- a 140-grain bullet sitting atop Hodgdon 4831 smokeless powder ignited by a Federal Magnum primer.

"I heard the big whop of my bullet hitting him," Coleman said. "And it seemed like only a second passed before Adam was sitting next to me in the truck, on the sendero, telling me he'd gotten the whole thing on video."

Oh, could things get any sweeter? Actually, they could.

Coleman and his guide first saw this amazing buck at 4:45 p.m.; he touched off the shot at 5. "It turned out that nobody had ever seen this buck before on the ranch," Coleman said. "When we first saw it, Adam and I guessed him to be in the 170-to-175 class."

Then, just a few minutes later, they found themselves in the presence of true South Texas buck royalty. "'Oh, my!' I remember saying," Coleman recalled. "'He's a little bigger than what we thought.'"

Talk about understatement!

"The first time I counted 31 scorable points," he said. "But I kept counting him over and over, and I got a different number every time. I was a little nervous, I guess."

Coleman and his guide got on the radio, contacting his hunting buddies on the other side of the ranch.

"'Y'all might want to ride over here; this is a 200-class buck,' I told them. And of course, they immediately hollered back it probably wasn't even a 195, giving me lots of grief. Adam convinced them that this was something they needed to come take a look at."

Rough-scoring as best they could, Coleman and Company came up with 227 7/8. "We started sending photos out on our cell phones, and before you know it, this deer was all over the place," he said.

Ultimately, it ended up in one of the most sought-after places in Texas deer hunting -- winning its division in the Los Cazadores Big Buck contest. Coleman's incredible buck took second place overall in the contest, beat out by a 248-inch buck killed behind a high fence.

"In 1994, I killed a buck in Mississippi that had been my biggest deer ever before this guy," Coleman said. "That buck scored 181 3/8, and was second in Mississippi only to the Fulton buck."

Coleman's hunting partners also scored on the trip. Jones tagged a 147-inch 9-pointer, "literally at the last minute," Coleman said. "Dustin took a 131-inch management buck -- an 11-pointer with a real pretty rack."

FOR YOUR INFORMATION
The McAllen family has owned and operated the ranch since 1791. More than six generations have lived on the property, and Texas officials recognize it as one of the state's oldest ranches in continuous family ownership.

In 2006, the ranch earned designation as a national historic area.

Find more about Texas fishing and hunting at: TexasSportsmanMag.com