Hunting

In mid-December, Burton Swoope of Belden had a gut feeling and a few days off remaining. He put those two together and drove south toward his deer camp near Columbus for a day he won’t soon forget.

“I knew the rut was on and I just decided to use a vacation day and hunt this particular Wednesday,” said Swoope, the plant manager of a concrete plant in Pontotoc.

The result: a 15-point buck that green-scored a gross of 167 5/8 and a net of 153 6/8. It is a thick and long but not particularly wide mainframe 11-point with four sticker points.

It is a brute, and the result of two decades of management on family property in the Golden Triangle area of the historically productive deer region known as the Black Belt Prairie.

“I killed him on family land outside of Columbus, where we’ve been under some type of management program for about 20 years,” Swoope said. “We started back in the early 90’s just trying to shoot 8-pointers or better. Now we try to only take fairly mature bucks, regardless of points, and a few does. It’s paid off with some really nice bucks over the years but as far as I know he’ll be the highest scoring ever killed on our land.” […]

For several years, the Mississippi Bowhunters Association has been looking for help from the state legislature in confirming the right to hunt with bows during open gun seasons.

So don’t expect them to be happy after Monday’s deadline passed for introducing new bills in the state’s House of Representatives and Senate. No such “pro archery” legislation is on the table.

For the third straight year, no bills were introduced that would extend the only true archery season set in statute — the one that opens Oct. 1 and ends on the day before the first gun season begins. […]

I was sitting on an East Texas pipeline, cradling my 7 1/2-inch Ruger Super Redhawk in my lap, watching a pile of corn that had been scattered about the area and trampled with hundreds of hog tracks.

My hand cannon was stuffed with 335-grain hard-cast bullets in .454 Casull, a potent enough load in itself, but this went the extra step. These rounds were manufactured by Cor-Bon — a company that found its niche in the ammunition market by producing ammo that pushed the envelope. […]