One Heck Of A Ride

38 Everyone’s Deer culture of its residents and their city’s colonial architecture. I had read somewhere that most of its people were directly descended from the Mayans who a thousand years ago created a calendar, built more than 1,500 cities, and left behind hundreds of stone temples, pyramids and sculptures that still are being discovered in the Yucatan Peninsula’s rainforests. The appearance of the indigenous people I saw left little doubt of their heritage; they were short people with dark skin and strong cheekbones. Eduardo said many of them spoke both Mayan and Spanish and considered themselves Mayans living in Mexico. Eduardo was a busy man, but he took time off to drive Norm and me several hundred miles northwest to visit my friend, Hubert Thummler, a Weatherby Award recipient and one of Mexico’s best-known international big game hunters, at his country home near Tequisquiapan, a village in the state of Queretaro, about two hours from Mexico City. “Home” cannot adequately describe Hubert’s Mexican colonial estate. Its main structure covers 19,200 square feet and the separate church he built for his children to be married in adds another 4,000 square feet. He has life-size mounts of big game animals in nearly every category in the SCI record books on display in his three large trophy rooms, but his collection has outgrown those rooms and spilled over into other rooms and hallways. There is nothing like his collection anywhere in the world, and I felt fortunate to have seen it. A Northeastern Whitetail From Michigan Beginning in the early 1990s, closely managing indigenous white-tailed deer on high- fenced properties in Michigan and elsewhere across the northern United States has produced private herds of deer with antlers so large that saying “awesome” to describe them would be a gross understatement. Because estate owners utilize selective culling and plant special food plots (some also use supplemental feeding) and, more importantly, wait to harvest their bucks until they are 4.5 years old, estate deer would dominate the record books if they were listed with free- ranging deer. To keep this from happening while still honoring the animals and their hunters, SCI lists estate deer in separate subcategories. My second experience with hunting whitetails behind high wire came in 2008, when I attended the auction at the OVIS convention that year and bought a five-day hunt donated by Redpine Whitetails Ranch. When I flew to Michigan on 29 October, I was met and driven an hour to the estate owned by Larry and Cindy Higgins near Gaylord in Otsego County. The center of their comfortable main lodge, where everyone gathered after hunting and our meals were served, had an oversize antique pot-bellied stove as well as a stone fireplace. Everything had the look of a luxurious 1930s hunting camp, but with modern amenities. I was pleasantly surprised to see Bill and Ingrid Poole of San Diego also were hunting there. (I had met them at various SCI events, and was shocked when I heard he died a year after this hunt. He was a widely known and respected international hunter, a boat builder, and operator of one of my state’s largest sportfishing fleets.) Larry, who a few years after my hunt would serve two terms as SCI president, said his 640- Red brocket deer taken on Campeche estate by walking and spotting