Brush Country Culture

One of the first things you'll notice when driving into the small town of Freer, Texas, is a welcome sign adorned with the steel silhouette of a double-drop-tine buck. Drive on and you'll see another sign proclaiming Freer to be the home of, among other things, the Muy Grande Deer Contest and Freer Deer Camp, a one-stop shop for hunters offering everything from taxidermy to meat-processing services.

You would be hard-pressed to spot many cattle on surrounding ranches. Most ranchers have gone over to deer management, which is more profitable. Freer, with a population of less than 3,500 people and only two restaurants--one of which is a Dairy Queen--hosts not one but two big-buck contests, including the granddaddy of them all, the Muy Grande. If Freer isn't the ground zero of South Texas whitetail hunting, it's clearly in the immediate neighborhood.

"There are two things that keep this place afloat," says Shane Levee, of Freer Deer Camp. "One is oil and gas--the other is deer."

It was here that I came to see for myself what South Texas deer hunting was all about. I traveled to Freer to hunt under a managed lands permit on Rancho Venado Grande, which literally means "big deer ranch," before the regular season opened. The 3,100-acre chunk of prime deer habitat is owned by six partners, including a major league baseball player. I was there for a management hunt, to cull a mature buck up to 140 B&C or so, from the herd. The goal on such hunts is to harvest bucks that are either past their prime or genetically inferior.

I arrived with a hatful of assumptions, including the seriously flawed notion that tagging such a buck might be too easy.

Day One: I arrive in time to check the zero of my rifle and drive around the ranch with Gary Raesz, one of the partner-owners of the ranch. Turning a corner onto a sendero, we see a huge buck bounding into the brush. Gary believes he is a big 9-pointer that will score in the mid-160s. The partners will allow me to take him if we get an opportunity because he is an old buck and unlikely to grow better antlers. One glimpse at his rack has my heart thumping, but we will never see him again in four days of hunting.

We spend the first afternoon hunting from blind No. 3, which has seen a lot of recent deer activity. The weather here is unseasonably warm, even by South Texas standards, and few deer move before legal shooting light expires.

South Texas. The words alone conjure up images of monster bucks. While deer in the region possess the genetics to grow huge antlers, Texans aren't content to let it go at that. In a state where bigger is assumed to be better, deer are literally bought and sold by the antler inch.