CHICKASAW COUNTY – The buck that stepped out in front of Matt Ellis, 16, this past Tuesday afternoon changed a somber, peaceful sit into an adrenaline-charged, heart-pounding experience in a simple flash of brown. It ended a two-year investigative quest pursued with only the scantest of evidence and confirmed a passion nurtured since the young man’s earliest days.
Ellis has been hunting deer since his formative, single-digit years. Sitting in a ground blind with family members, he collected his first, a doe, with a crossbow, before he was 5. Working on a tract of family land, he’s been involved with the deer hunting process in every month of all the years since. Hundreds of hunts have filled his fall afternoons and winter days. They’ve built for him a well-appointed vocabulary of whitetail knowledge. More importantly, it’s a complete process he’s come to enjoy in all the wide variety of its aspects. Shooting, recovering, skinning and processing deer are all part of it, as are the meals that result. These rewards are but a welcome part of a process that extends much deeper though.
“My favorite part is just the tranquility of it,” Ellis said of the quiet hours spent in a deer stand. “It’s very peaceful.”
Deer season in Mississippi runs from October through January, but, of course, the deer live on the land they call home all year long. Taking care of that land with the deer in mind, tending the hollows and the hills, doing the best possible job for the resource involves planning, fertilizing and planting. It involves management of timber and streams. It involves making sure the deer can easily access everything they want or need, including swaths of ground onto which people virtually never go.
Mostly, it requires patience and perseverance spread across great intervals of time. There has to be a lot more to it than the simple adrenaline blast associated with the few seconds surrounding go time. That adrenaline is important, even vital, but it can’t be all.
“Sharing all of the experience with my family is a really big part of it,” Ellis said. Planting fields in the spring and summer, clearing roads in the summer and fall, monitoring trail cameras throughout the year, enjoying the days as they pass and anticipating the wonders nature may work with man’s aid all come together for an experience that transcends any single moment.
Mississippi’s deer season itself is a complete library of climatic conditions. The archery opener in October generally arrives as hot as any midsummer’s day. The months of opportunity that follow include everything from sweat-dripping T-shirt sunsets to ice-covered sunrises frozen hard and buffeted by the wind. Constant and consistent to it all, though, is the silence. Time in a deer stand involves a kind of quiet we rarely find anywhere else. It’s a quiet necessary for any hunter, elemental to the scene, mandatory for those hours to maintain. Over time, we can blend with that silence, let it pass through us and become more of who we are.
Ultimately, the land’s service, the stand’s silence and the rare, occasional, only-every-so-often shattering shock form a complete cycle that keeps a hunter indoctrinated for life.
All in a moment
Tuesday afternoon, as the last sun of 2024 fell from sight and the sky grew dim, Ellis began packing his gear away. The hunt, maybe his 20th sit of the season, had been as quiet as most. His stand occupied the east end of a 150-yard strip of greenfield, one that split to wrap a large oak two thirds of the way down. In the hours since early afternoon, one very young buck had passed through, two does had appeared and remained, but otherwise the action had been restricted to pine boughs blowing in the breeze and the silence of the afternoon settling all around. Before unloading his rifle and walking away, he took one more look toward the far end of his view. As he did, a large-bodied something moved behind a patch of thicket near the far end.
“I could see it was a big deer, but I couldn’t tell anything else about it,” he said. “I didn’t know if it was just a very fat doe or what.”
Eventually the critter took a couple steps into the open, and Ellis saw the buck he’d been hunting for two years for all of the second time.
“We had one picture of this deer on a trail camera,” he said.
That picture had been taken on the edge of another field, and it had happened only once. He had seen this buck one time live and in person, though, and that had happened in the field he had chosen to hunt Tuesday afternoon. In person trumps in pixels, which is how he’d come to be where he was that day.
“The field I was hunting is pretty close to the field where he’d been on camera,” he said. “The deer that use that field and the one I was hunting share the same cover, and I’d seen him in the field I was hunting one time last year.”
As he looked at the deer for the total of a second time, one glance was all he needed to know it was a shooter, in fact, the shooter. What he needed after that was a few calming, deep breaths.
“I was shaking so badly I could hardly see straight,” Ellis said.
The deer remained in the very edge of the field for some time, obscured by a bit of protruding brush, before finally walking into the open and coming to a stop, 130 yards away and standing broadside. When the buck did, Ellis made a smooth squeeze of his Browning A-Bolt’s trigger and sent a single battery of .30-06 downrange. He waited until a number of family members were on the scene before taking up the track.
“I went to where the buck was when I made the shot and only found one single drop of blood,” he said. “I was convinced that, when I shot, he had run back to the left, and we spent an hour looking for any sign at all in that direction. I was just crushed, thinking I had made a bad shot.”
An hour along, a short lifetime after they’d begun looking, Matt’s younger brother, Ben, happened to find another drop of blood several steps, not to the left, but to the right. It didn’t take many more steps in that direction to confirm the deer had, in fact, run that way. Only another 50 yards further along, the trail ended with the buck itself, perfectly hit and thoroughly expired.
“I couldn’t even speak, I was so excited,” Ellis said. “I could yell but couldn’t get out any actual words. Thanks to my brother for finding it. It’s something I’ll never forget.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 24 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
