Steve Whisenant (left) and Bud Dearing admire the gargantuan buck near the spot at which it fell. Whisenant passed on a chance to down the deer, generously insisting that his longtime friend be the one to claim the phenomenal animal. Photo courtesy of Bud Dearing.

Dearing has been so successful in managing his land for wildlife that he was presented the TPWD's Region 3 Lone Star Land Steward Award in a special celebration in Austin on May 21 this year. The program annually recognizes landowners in eight ecological regions who have excelled at wildlife and habitat management on their properties.

THE DEER
Like many a big buck on low-fenced ranches, Dearing's monster whitetail may have managed to remain in seclusion from birth to harvest. In northern Erath County, an area of rugged hills and canyons that are heavily timbered and rocky, a deer can step into the open and disappear in seconds, and some hunters say that many of the larger specimens are never seen at all. Alternatively, it simply grew antlers that may have been considered merely admirable during its first three years of life.

It was during the 2005-06 season that good fortune gave Dearing his first look at what two seasons later would be the huge 14-pointer he was ultimately to shoot and enter into the record book.

Despite drought over much of North and West Texas at that time, Dearing's food plots and high protein commercial feed had helped the buck to grow -- virtually unnoticed by Dearing and other hunters -- into a magnificent animal with a heavy, relatively wide rack.

"I was taking a lady hunting for a spike deer one day when the big one came out of the trees," the rancher recalled. "He was a really nice 10-pointer, and I told her that buck was going to be a really big deer in one or two years."

In the period that followed, the buck remained elusive, apparently enjoying the company of numerous well-fed does, and a homeland that included steep, dense hills and canyons furnished with lots of escape routes and feeling little hunting pressure.

A year later, the big buck showed up again, this time in images captured by motion-sensitive trail cameras that Dearing and his longtime friend and hunting companion Steve Whisenant had set up around protein feeders. The buck, now sporting a very impressive 12-point rack, had managed to elude all eyes -- but not the gaze of the trail camera.

Whisenant established a file folder containing images of the bucks recorded by the trail cameras. These showed numerous well-proportioned animals, among them several "management" 8- and 10-pointers that most hunters would relish placing on their walls.

The 2006-07 season ended with Dearing confident that his land management program was well on the right track. After all, several exceptional 8- to 10-pointers as well as the "management bucks" had been observed that season, and the promise of revivifying rains in the region was on tap for the following spring and early summer.

Another season had passed, but somewhere beyond the flash of the trail cameras, Dearing believes, the big buck that he'd later shoot was about to encounter light of a different kind -- perhaps that from someone spotlighting deer.

Spring and early-summer rainfall hit record levels, causing flooding problems in some areas of the region, but replenishing underground water sources and promoting heavy growths of ground cover and excellent deer forage.