A friend emailed me this pic, supposedly a 266 point buck taken near Camp Bullis, Texas:

For all you non-Texans, Camp Bullis is just a few miles north of San Antonio. I can remember when I was stationed in San Antonio when my wife and I would put the top down on the Alfa and take a drive in early evening just to watch the deer come out. She really liked it in the Spring when the does would come out with their fawns.

I spent a lot of time at Camp Bullis while I was serving active duty Air Force at nearby Brooks AFB. Some of it was doing volunteer work for the hunting program they had there, the rest was spent hunting deer.

Camp Bullis is a large (128,000 acres, I think) training facility for the Army, but much of it is available for hunting by permit only.

It's been over 15 years since I've been there, but I clearly recognize the background as being the freezer and rear entrance to the main "hunting office" at Camp Bullis. All deer taken on post had to be aged and weighed here - there is a metal wedge hanging on the cedar post - it's used to open the mouth for aging.

The biggest bucks usually came from the "impact area" on Camp Bullis, which was used for live fire training so much that only a handful of days a year were open to hunt it - my guess would be that a buck like this could certainly have come from there. Interestingly, the Camp record weight for a whitetail buck (they had axis deer there, too) that I remembered was about 130 lbs. dressed! (typical for Edwards Plateau) This picture also looks like a smaller bodied deer, but certainly a wall-hanger of a rack!

The buck weighed 118 lbs. It was spotted by a chopper pilot who radioed it in. It was dragging its rear legs. It was near stand #77. Folks investigating thought its back was most probably broken and the deer was destroyed.

It sported 40 or 41 countable points. It is a dandy, for sure.

The SA paper reports today that the taking of this deer with a pocket knife (illegal to take deer with this weapon) is being investigated and someone is likely to be prosecuted. Suppose the rack will reside permanently with Uncle Sam (some General)!

It was killed with a folding type hunting knife. The knife was shown with one of the original pictures and was laid, sorta, across the brow tines. If I understood correctly, a biologist was present and determined that the deer needed to be destroyed due to the nature of the injury.

Makes you speculate on how many big boys like that are out there and just die of old age or injuries, never to be harvested or are just rarely if ever seen. I saw one last year that a border DEA agent found while on patrol, South of Del Rio, that was an absolute monster. He's had it mounted. Dont know if it was scored or not.