By Billy Davis

Every deer hunter, if they stay in the woods long enough, has a tale or two to tell. Here is a hunting story from William “Bull” Robinson, with a twist:

On Christmas Eve morning, Robinson, 49, was deer hunting with friend Mike Cook at a hunting club in the Mt. Olivet area.

Bull is employed as an Air Force ROTC instructor at South Panola High, where Cook is a Building Trades instructor.  

It was expected to be a quick hunt, since Bull was joining his wife Robin later that morning. And that dilemma changed everything.  

With Mike’s son Hunter in tow, Bull loaded his gear in Mike’s truck then the hunters took off down a dirt road at the camp. When Bull unzipped his Browning rifle from its case, he realized he should have left the case in his own car, since he was leaving early.

So Bull set out on foot to take it back. On the way, he spotted a fresh scrape.

About fifty yards from his car, and 50 yards from the scrape, Bull sat down near the dirt road, giving him a 100-yard view among pines and hardwoods.

Then he saw the buck, a hundred yards away, walking slowly up the road.

“At first I thought it was Mike coming to check on me,” he recalled. When he looked through the binoculars, he saw the horns.

Bull decided to let the buck walk closer, but the Browning .280 was shaking in his hands as seconds ticked by. His heart was pounding.

“He walked another 10 steps or so, and then stopped and appeared to be walking back into the woods,” Bull recalled.

So the hunter had to shoot. Now. He lined up the scope, aiming for the front shoulder, but was shaking so badly he hit the buck in the stomach.  

Then it was gone.

Bull found drops of blood, a promising sign, but he knew he had not made a “clean” shot, and the buck was nowhere in sight.

So Bull, Mike and Hunter began looking for the deer, with Mike leading the way. They crawled, on hands and knees, through thickets and briars, in and out of ditches, and up and down hills and hollows.

At the hunting camp, minutes turned to more than an hour. Bull, frustrated and feeling hopeless, remembers telling his friend he intended to sell his gun and give up hunting.

“Mike looked at me and said, ‘I’m not gonna let you do that.’” Mike persevered, because the circumstances were special: Bull had just shot his first buck.

Bull Robinson, although 50, had only started deer hunting in 2007. He has bagged several does in that time, becoming known as the “doe slayer.” But he had never brought home a buck.

Friends tried to put Bull on a buck, but two hunting seasons came and went. Bull, growing impatient, said he would look at the photos of deer hunters in The Panolian — many of them children — and wonder when his time would come to harvest a buck.

A few minutes later, after two hours of searching, they found the buck, an eight-point.

The eight-point was taken to Batesville Gun and Pawn, where it was measured for the Big Buck Contest. The deer scored 42.25 points, with a 12-inch spread. The main beams spanned 18 and ¼ inches.  

The 42-point score won’t win Bull Robinson first place, since far bigger and better deer have been entered this year. But that isn’t the point.

Is it, deer hunters?