Forty years ago, my brother and I and a friend of ours had access to three adjoining properties near his house, probably 1000 acres in all. Biggest draw was that it was convenient to my brother's house. All owners were people we'd known forever, were friendly with, etc. There were several other properties around there we could hunt also. One year I shot an absolutely gorgeous 10 point... it was the kind of perfect, long-tined, symmetrical rack usually only seen on calendars and magazine covers. Okay... following year, I shot an eight-point that was actually a bigger deer, over 200 pounds dressed. Shortly after that one of the landowners told my brother the other two told him they were going to post their property and not allow us to hunt there any longer and if he wasn't going to do the same, he couldn't hunt on their property either. He told my brother we were still welcome on his place, to hell with his neighbors. My brother told him, no, go ahead and go along with them, it wasn't any big deal. We had just closed the lease deal on a much better hunting property and were intending to open it up to those guys as well, seeing as how they'd let us hunt their places all those years. Oh well. We kept that lease for 35 years, until I moved out of the state and, actually can still hunt it if we want to. Meanwhile we also bought over 200 acres of our own and got the adjoining 400 under lease. We have killed a lot of trophy deer over the years.
