Allen Hunley displays the rack of his B&C monster buck. That’s older brother Alvin, who talked Allen into taking up hunting, helping to show off the deer. Photo by Robert H. Cleveland Jr.

Mississippi's amazing 2007-08 deer season, which produced 10 Boone and Crockett qualifiers, a new state archery record and dozens of other incredible bucks, didn't slow down during either the December or January primitive weapon seasons.

Here's a collection of three short stories of hunts involving smokepoles, all of which resulted in wonderful racks.

BROTHERLY LOVE
Just a year after his older brother talked Allen Hunley of Utica into joining him for a deer hunt, the younger brother blasted his way into Mississippi's deer-hunting record books. His buck turned out to be the second highest non-typical ever taken with a muzzle-loader in the Magnolia State.

Not bad for a starter, eh?

To say Hunley, 23 at the time, was a neophyte hunter is an understatement. Here's how green he was: When he called his brother, Alvin, 26, on his cell phone to tell him he had killed a big buck, he wasn't talking about the antlers. He was referring to the body size and wondering how the two of them would get it out of the woods.

"That's true," Allen Hunley confirmed. "I was amazed at how big it was. I mean -- it was huge: It weighed 240 pounds.

"I couldn't believe it when I first saw it up close after I had knocked it down. I looked at it and my first thought was that I was going to need some help."

But what about the antlers? After all, it had 13-inch-plus G-3s and 11-inch-plus G-2s.

"Honestly, I didn't know that much about all that, except that it had some big points," he said. "All I thought about when I first got to it was how in the world were we going to get that giant deer out of there."

When officially scored, the 11-point rack amassed 173 2/8 points to qualify for the Boone and Crockett Club All-Time Record book.

Let's start a year earlier, with big brother Alvin. The two brothers are very close. They even own their own treecutting, landscaping and 'dozer company. About the only thing that they didn't do together was hunt.

"No, I was the hunter," Alvin said. "Sort of self-taught. I'd been hunting for about 10 years. I loved it, and I thought he would, too." So before the 2006-07 season, Alvin talked Allen into going.

"I told him he ought to go and he went with me a few times that year and got the bug," Alvin Hunley said. "This year, man, he's been all up in it. He has been fired up. When the primitive weapon season opened, he didn't want to stop, so he borrowed the muzzleloader from a friend so he could keep hunting. It was Allen who insisted we go that morning."

The two brothers drove to some private land in Hinds County at sunrise, parked and walked to different ridges overlooking a large block of cutover forest. They were sitting about 500 yards apart.

"I walked to the end of a ridge and sat down on the ground with my back up against a tree," Allen Hunley recounted. "I had been there about an hour and I looked up and saw four does. I was thinking about shooting one of the does, but then I saw a bigger-bodied deer behind them, and then I saw some antlers. He was just grazing around behind those does. I could tell he was a pretty good buck, because he was so big."