98—And Still At It

So, how did you ring in the fabulous New Year of 2025? Or is your head still too swollen to remember?

Well, if this was your 98th—no misprint, and I ain’t expecting I got many takers out there—new year, maybe you were knocking down the latest in a very long line of whitetail bucks.

Like Buren Mock.

You may remember that name from a couple years ago (March, 2023 issue) when I wrote about a 96-year-old who stated that deer hunting was a large part of what kept him going.

As of New Year’s weekend—Saturday, Jan. 4, to be exact—it’s still working!

Mister B.O., as he’s very well known in the Colquitt area, is the last surviving World War II veteran in Miller County. Last Nov. 16, smack-dab in the middle of deer season, he turned 98 years old. And on that gloomy, overcast afternoon last month he once more put to the test an aging rifle that you may also recall.

The hunts are different now, as you may imagine, for a hunter staring a full century in the face. He’s fortunate to have a magnanimous neighbor in Steve Holt, who allows Mister B.O. to hunt from what many, many years ago was a commissary building that also housed a turpentine still. It’s open-sided, but with a roof to help keep some of the January weather out.

Let him tell you about it…

“I only went four times this year because of the cold, and I can’t handle it like I used to,” he said. “I also can’t hold that (Remington) 742 up too well, because I ain’t quite as strong as I once was. But Steve has two stacks of five-gallon buckets in there, and I used one of them to rest that rifle on.

“The day I killed this buck I didn’t have much light left because it was cloudy, but he came in right where I thought he would. I’ve shot that rifle for a lot of years, and it dropped that deer with one shot pretty much like it always has when I put it where I’m supposed to. He had been fighting, and broke off a couple of tines, so he would have been an 8-pointer early on.

“But these days, those points don’t bother me much.”

These days?

Well, the way I look at it, only eight or so months remain until the season rolls back around, nine until his 99th birthday. What then?

“This may be my last year, I don’t know,” he says. “But if I feel like I do now, I’ll probably try it again, because I just love deer hunting. My doctor says he’s going to keep me around until I’m 100, so I may just keep on hunting if I feel like it.”

Put this on your calendar, Mister B.O.: I’d love to be sitting in that commissary with you on Nov. 16, 2026…