It’s funny how counting a few points can stoke a man’s furnace.
On the last day of the Black Warrior Wildlife Management Area’s three-day, mid-December rifle season, Shannon Alvis shot one of the largest public land bucks ever recorded from Alabama.
He can thank a buddy, Darrell See, for telling about the hunt, his intuition for choosing the perfect place to hang a stand, and a doe for leading the giant whitetail to slaughter.
The state-run WMA lies within the 180,000-acre Bankhead National Forest. It’s split into two east-west zones, A and B, and spans about half of the federal tract. Shannon was hunting Zone A on the Lawrence County side.
The 42-year-old hunter now living in Bremen, Alabama, still isn’t convinced he wasn’t dreaming.
“I hunted the Bankhead years and years ago, until I moved,” he said. “I just moved back to north Alabama from Bibb County. While I was living down there, I hunted other WMAs like Oakmulgee.”
When he moved back to Cullman County, he began bowhunting the Black Warrior’s Zone B, which is 70 miles from his front door. His friend Darrell convinced him to participate in the A side’s Dec. 8-10 rifle hunt.
“He told me how to get to one place, and I went looking for it on Thursday. That was my first time to go in there,” Shannon said. “While looking for it, I found a natural funnel with lots of trails and big buck sign.”
When he returned on Saturday, Dec. 10, he met Darrell at the WMA before daybreak. Theirs were among five trucks in the parking area.
Shannon gave serious thought to heading afield without his climber, but Darrell told him he should take it.
“If he hadn’t said that, if I had been hunting from the ground, I never would’ve seen this deer,” he said.
Shannon hiked almost 2 miles to reach his bucky place, and he was aloft before dawn. His original plan was to hold out for a stud, but as the morning wore on, the cold began seeping through his clothing.
He might’ve been freezing, but his resolve melted. He decided to shoot the first deer with antlers to walk within range.
“This one just happened to be the first racked buck I saw,” he said.
He spotted it dogging a doe at half past 9:00. The two deer were practically conjoined. They were barely 60 yards away when he squeezed the trigger a few seconds later.
“When I got down, I stood there shaking,” he said. “After about 15 minutes, I went to the deer and started counting points. I couldn’t believe how big it was.”
He forgot about the cold.
To keep a point of reference, Shannon left his stand attached to the tree when he walked back out to his truck. He shrugged out of some layers en route.
Shannon ran into two of the hunters he’d seen that morning when he reached his vehicle. They offered to help retrieve the animal. Darrell also loaned him a deer cart, although he’d shot a deer as well.
Even with plenty of help, it took two hours to wheel the deer through the rough terrain.
“I never would have got the deer out without their help,” Shannon said. “Those guys were really great. Not many people would have done what they did.”
The buck caused quite a stir at the check-in station. When the atmosphere calmed, game biologists examined the deer and proclaimed it to be 8 1/2 years old.
Shannon’s stepdad, a taxidermist, rough-scored the buck the next morning. He wasn’t very far off the mark.
This article was published in the March 2018 edition of Rack Magazine. Subscribe today to have Rack Magazine delivered to your home.
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