Chad Tate saw the trail cam photos of the monster buck and knew immediately that it was to be his son's deer. Almost two months later, it was.

As soon as Dr. Paul Warrington shot his trophy buck, he thought about his son in a nearby stand and how pleased he'd be to know that the deer they'd been hunting their whole lives was down.

Family -- and not always just in the form of father and son -- has always been a great part of the hunting tradition. So many great stories of success and love form the fabric of each deer season.

But never in the history of Mississippi has family had the impact it had on the record books as it did last season. Both of the bucks mentioned above qualified for the Boone and Crockett Club Record Book of North American Big Game.

Both hunts also involve great stories from the Mississippi woodlands. Here's a look at both of these yarns of successful hunts.

SHELBY TATE
207 6/8 B&C Non-Typical
In mid-November prior to the opening of the gun season, Chad Tate of Summit grabbed the disks out of the trail cameras from his deer camp in Amite County. As he scanned through the pictures on his computer, he nearly passed out: It was the biggest buck he'd ever seen -- way bigger than anything Tate had ever heard of from a county not known for giant bucks or non-typical growth.

Eleven-year-old Shelby Tate's non-typical buck from Amite County scored an impressive 207 6/8 B&C. Photo courtesy of Chad Tate.

"I couldn't believe what I was looking at," he said. "I looked at the pictures and all I could think of was that somebody had played a joke on me. It was a monster buck. I mean a real monster buck!"

As it became obvious that no trick had been played, and that the whitetail was real and living and walking around his deer camp, another thought occurred to Tate: This was a record-book buck.

"I knew immediately that this was a sure-enough Boone and Crockett buck -- and if it was going to be listed in the record book, either in B&C or in Mississippi's (Magnolia Records) book, the name beside it was not going to be mine," Tate said. "No, the name I wanted with that deer was my son's."

At age 11 Shelby Tate was to inherit the buck.

With that decision began a long, arduous labor of love that wouldn't play out for almost seven weeks. Killing a buck that big wouldn't be easy -- nor should it have been.

"I can't tell you now much agony that deer put us through," Chad Tate recalled. "I knew the area he was using. The cams had done that for us. It was in a small bottom, and there was a small field in it. That little field was where I knew we would likely get our best chance. I studied it and figured out exactly what conditions we needed wind-wise to hunt that area.

"I told all the people that hunt that area -- and it's not that many -- to stay away from there. And they did. We made that area off limits except to Shelby, and only then when the conditions were just right. They almost never were."