The buck I wanted was the nice eight-pointer with a good-sized body. A huge clump of brush filled much of the corner, and when deer moved behind the brush, I got into shooting position, my elbows on my knees, and rifle held forward. The deer were to my left and just rounding the far corner. I sat about midway along the longer bottom side of the rectangular fish pond. I crawled onto the levee, and found a slightly raised area, sat down and cradled the Rem R25 rifle across my knees. The five animals fed on grasses and slowly walked away from me. The two bucks had moved onto the levee now, and they had been joined by three does. I hiked along the edge of the levee for a couple hundred yards and then eased up onto the bank to peek through the brush. I got down from my stand as quietly as I could and ducked down into the nearest fish pond for cover. I could see antlers now, and they both appeared to be legal deer. As I glassed them, the two bucks moved to the edge of the levee and away from the shadows. In this region of Mississippi, a buck’s antlers need to have a 12-inch inside spread or a 15-inch long main beam to be legal. They were bucks, I was sure of that, but how big? And were they legal? Through my binoculars, I saw a stout deer body drifting through a dark brush, and then a second body. I ate lunch around noon and was sitting back in my chair feeling like a nap was coming on when I thought I saw a shadowy blur moving through the trees way beyond the fish ponds, 400 yards or more to my west. The levees are also a great place to set up a hunting stand, as they overlooked the brushy ponds, the grass-covered levees where deer liked to feed, and the stands of oak beyond the ponds.Ī half-dozen does and their young showed up that morning to feed on levee grass.

The levees were still in place, and from the sky, the ponds looked like a half-dozen large rectangles sunk into the ground. Now, they were large depressions ten feet deep or more, and overgrown with brush and small trees. But the fish business went bad, and the ponds were drained out many years ago. My friend had dug a number of fish ponds years ago, five- and ten-acre impoundments where they raised catfish. I saw whitetails, but all does, and a few young four-point bucks.ĭay Three found me in a large, elevated hunting stand built between a series of defunct fish ponds. I spent the first two days trying out different locations. So, I was in the Delta trying to fill a deer tag. 308 Win.Ī good friend of mine farms several thousand acres of the Delta, and he has extended an open invitation to me to hunt his land. In this case, my rifle was a Remington R25 GenII, Remington’s second generation of the gun maker’s AR-10, chambered in. And I was using one of my favorite types of deer-hunting firearms: an AR-style rifle.

I was deer hunting in one of my favorite places in the world, the Mississippi Delta, near Yazoo City, Mississippi.

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