Unlike Shangri-La, Los Cuernos wasn't a mythical paradise. It was a real place. But, sadly, the whitetail ranch near Laredo, Texas, familiar to many longtime HUNTING readers, is no more. Over the last 21 years, Los Cuernos Ranch inspired a hundred deer-related features for this magazine and a hundred more "Buck Sense" columns, plus occasional mentions by writers other than myself.

Reprinted for Houston Safari Club Hunter's Horn; Summer 2020 - After a quarter century of whitetail hunting, the author’s wife was rewarded with the buck of a lifetime. Her name is Jeannie. We called the deer “the early buck” because our only sightings of him in two seasons had been very early in the morning. Both times he’d appeared in the gray dawn near our camp house...