Photo By Mark Werner

I'm not sure why I'm even sitting here, I thought to myself. It's cold -- well, by Texas standards, anyway. I haven't seen a buck from this particular stand all year, and there are exactly 12 hours left in the season. A smart hunter would have gone duck hunting, or not got himself in this situation to begin with.

I've never been accused of being smart. So there I sat in the first few minutes of legal shooting light on the last day of the season, shivering and deerless, hanging onto the last ray of hope that a buck -- any buck -- might walk by.

Looking at the smoke rising from the farmhouse just a quarter-mile away, thoughts of heading in to the warmth of a fire and breakfast began to creep into my steadily congealing brain. My sore back, numb posterior and frostbitten fingers all murmured: It's OK. Everyone will understand. There's no shame in coming home empty-handed. It's not about taking a deer -- it's the hunt that matters.

Bacon sure would be good about now.

Turning away from the house, I tried to convince myself that I was going to stay on stand come hell or frozen appendages -- and that's when I saw him.

There was little doubt that it was a "him." The buck appeared as thick as an Angus bull, heavy-beamed antlers silhouetted against the frost-laden grass. With the single-minded intention of reaching his bedding area before the sun broke the horizon, the old buck had made a fatal mistake: Instead of staying in the thin finger of woods lining the small creek, he'd chosen to shorten his route a few hundred yards by cutting across the field I was set up on. I prayed that the single cartridge that had been loaded into the chamber of my rifle countless times that season wasn't a dud.

The shot was anticlimactic. A few minutes later the 9-pointer was in the bed of the truck. That bacon is going to taste even better now, I thought. And I was right!

Admit it: You've stopped deer hunting at Thanksgiving before. Most East Texas hunters have done that-- and who can blame them? By the time December rolls around, the rut is a distant memory, and the bucks that survived the nonstop barrage from armed humans perched atop climbing stands have disappeared. However, persistent hunters understand that the tail end of the season can be one of the best times to pattern an old buck.

The rut, while one of the most celebrated and anticipated periods of the year for a deer hunter, also is one of the most unpredictable and physically stressing to a buck. Often leaving his core area and running for days with little rest and even less food, a buck can lose considerable weight that needs to be replaced if he is to survive even the moderate Texas winters.