Every year, Chris Robbins schedules his weeklong vacation to coincide with Indiana's whitetail rut. In 2006, instead of bowhunting his usual spot in Jackson County, Chris hunted with friends Mike Palmer and Bill Georges at a military base north of Columbus.

Most years, the base is opened to archers four days a week, Monday through Thursday. By the end of the hunt on Thursday, four days into his vacation, Chris had seen only two deer. On Friday, he returned to similar conditions in Jackson County.

On his way home from the woods Friday night, Chris called his longtime hunting buddy Brad Shepherd. He had been in touch with Brad throughout the week, so Brad knew things had been slow. He wound up inviting his pal to spend the rest of the weekend hunting with him in Switzerland County.

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For Ben Knisley, a "good" deer season is defined by how much time he's able to spend in the woods with family and friends. Filling a tag always comes second to the young Minnesotan, and he's not picky when opportunity knocks.

The 2006 season was good on both counts. Not only did Ben shoot a buck (a serious understatement), but he also got to share the hunt with his Uncle Dick.

Ben rolled out of the sack before sunrise on Nov. 4, eager to hunt the family farm he'd prowled since he was a kid. He was greeted by bitter cold, not unusual for that time of year in Minnesota.

He hunted hard all morning, checking all the spots where he had seen deer in years past. The deer, however, were nowhere to be seen. Around noon, Ben decided to leave and grab a bite to eat. He also was ready for a change of scenery for his afternoon hunt.

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It had been two years since their last encounter, and, suddenly, only 20 feet separated Greg Holthaus, up a tree in a climbing stand, and the Illinois slammer that had haunted his dreams after back-to-back misses in 2004.

"Here it came, walking right for me, but it was leery and cagey," Greg said. "With the buck coming straight on like that, I never had a chance to draw."

Greg held his bow and quiver in front of his face, hoping the buck would continue walking and pass under his stand, possibly offering a quartering-away shot. The skyline was behind him, and the tree he'd climbed was slightly smaller than the width of his body.

"The deer came directly under my tree, stopped and looked up at me," Greg said. "I was shaking horribly, and it seemed like 10 minutes passed."

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I started hunting deer in 1963, and I've had a Nebraska permit every year since, except for the four years I served in the Air Force. Even then, the two years I was stationed in Cheyenne, Wyo., I was able to hunt elk, deer and antelope.

The deer I bagged in 2007, my best in 44 years, was no stranger to me. Nor did it surprise my son, Tom, and granddaughter, Whitney Pfister. Those two saw the buck in 2006 while hunting along what we call the hedgerow. They were hunkered inside a blind in the tall CRP grass until about 9 a.m.

While walking back to the truck, they spotted this buck in my cornfield. Nobody ever saw it again that year. My guess was that it had wound up in someone's Deepfreeze.

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Eighteen-year-old Steve Hunt of Sterling, Ohio, spends a lot of time hunting with his grandfather, Skip Johnson. On Dec. 27, 2006, opening day of the late muzzleloader season, the two were accompanied by a couple of Steve's friends.

Since Steve had shot a doe in the early gun season, he gave up his usual spot to one of his friends, while he headed for the other side of the road. By 7:15 that morning, he'd picked out a tree to break his outline and had sat down beside it.

There wasn't much activity during the first hour, but then Steve heard a shot pretty close, which brought him to his feet. 

While surveying the area, he glanced behind him to see a buck at a mere 50 yards. Without bothering to evaluate antlers, he shouldered his .50-caliber inline, put the crosshairs on the animal's shoulder and squeezed the trigger. After the smoke dissipated, he saw that his first-ever buck was lying on the ground.

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I met Buddy Edlin of Crooked Creek Whitetails 10 years ago on my first paid hunt. Buddy and his family have since been really good friends. And for the past seven or eight years, I have been the breakfast cook and sometimes help guide.
On Nov. 3, 2007, I arrived at camp about 8 p.m.  When I walked through the door, it felt like I'd come home. It's amazing to be able to go around the table and know everyone's name.

For eight years, my place to hunt has been a piece of ground in Schuyler County. It's made up of a mere 12 acres of timber, but it's surrounded by cornfields.

The next morning, a Sunday, I set out around 7:00 to hang my stand in the same tree from which I've taken several good deer over the years. As I walked to it, I noticed a bunch of scrapes and antler-ravaged trees. I was pumped!

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New deer hunters would trade big woods serenity and fresh air for the ambient noise of a nearby highway and a breeze tainted by diesel fumes. But one bowhunter from Fort Wayne, Ind., has learned that aesthetics have little to do with one's chances of taking home a buck.

Wayne Leazier Jr. logs a lot of miles each fall in his quest for whitetails, mostly between home and southern Michigan. Give him a few days, and he's going to watch his odometer spin en route to the deer woods. Give him a few hours, however, and he's going to find a way to hunt much closer to home.

That's what happened back in October 2005. Faced with a drizzly afternoon that didn't involve masonry or construction, Wayne set out for a friend's place in his own Allen County, a 150- to 200-yard wide strip of timber so thick it would've made beagles turn tail and run.

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Indiana hunter Brad Thurman was sure the magic of the day was about to pull a disappearing act...

The bedded buck flicked an ear and lifted its chin a couple of times as if nodding, checking for scent. Brad's belly-crawling through the meadow ceased, leaving him in an awkward position. He let his eyes roll right to see what had caught the buck's attention.

Brad had already crawled about 100 yards, low as a lioness in the grass, using one pressed-down furrow left by an ATV. Since daybreak, he'd watched the buck, first chasing and then bedding with a doe about 200 yards from his treestand.
Three hours later, with the deer lying in the same place and the wind perfect, Brad had decided to make a move.

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When Mike Brey returned to his truck on the morning of Dec. 9, 1994, he found a note.

"You're not welcome here," it read. "Your tag number will be given to the sheriff's department."

No big deal, he thought, tossing it on the front seat.

The then 37-year-old contractor was hunting legally on a 40-acre tract owned by a relative. He might've avoided the note if he'd parked in his cousin's yard, but he didn't want the dogs to follow him. So he'd pulled onto the shoulder of a public road. The neighbors, at least one of them, didn't care for hunters.

No problem. He wouldn't need to park there for another year, because his tag was punched. Did you hear that, world? 

HIS TAG WAS PUNCHED!

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Gene Figge had no way of knowing that the 2004 season would be his last to hunt the Jersey County, Ill., farm his family had enjoyed for nearly three decades. About a month after deer season ended, the landowner died, and the property was sold.

The new owners have not been as generous.

But while the '04 season ended on a sour note for the Figges, it began with a bang.
Literally.

Opening day of shotgun season found Gene hunting the farm with his father, Dennis. Even the worst weather couldn't keep them indoors, since the season lasted only three days.

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Nov. 29, 2007, the day I shot the 35-pointer that set tongues wagging across all of North America, wasn't the first time I saw the buck. The previous year on the very same field, my wife, Gail, and I both shot at and missed it.

I can't speak for my wife, but that whitetail rattled me so badly that I had a hard time hitting the air around it.

That was last season. This year was different. I was calm, cool and collected, and when the shot presented itself, I took my time and squeezed the trigger. Ya, right! Now I know why they put that metal guard under the trigger. I pulled so fast and hard that if it hadn't been there, I would have broken it off!

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Being in the right place at the right time generally counts for something. And this might be particularly true when it comes to hunting big whitetails.

Many tales are told of ones that got away. They were too far, too fast, or it just flat out didn't work for whatever reason. However, once in a great while a plan comes together and Lady Luck shines brightly on a hunter.

Such was the case for a 13-year-old Junction City, Kan., teen when he shot his first whitetail during the 2007 youth season near his home.

James Livingston is an eighth-grader and moved to the Sunflower State from Idaho when his father transferred to a new job. His father, Jerry, admitted Kansas' reputation as a state with a rich pheasant hunting tradition weighed on his decision to move his family there.

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When we published the first issue of Rack magazine 10 years ago, we mailed a trial copy to several thousand Buckmasters members in hopes that they'd love the concept and take a chance on trying out a subscription. The results were wildly successful, but for Buckmasters publications, it was a huge gamble as well, for several reasons.

First, we'd decided to take Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine off the newsstand for fiscal purposes. Thanks to our nearly 400,000 loyal readers, we were comfortable in doing that. So when we launched Rack, we knew it wouldn't have the benefit of newsstand exposure, which is so vitally important for a brand new magazine.

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With the optimism and excitement of everyone who uses a trail camera for scouting, Patrick Cady shuffled through photos. Does, does, whoa! A monster buck was casing his neighborhood!

"Based on what the camera told me, I went out on a Sunday morning, Oct. 3, hung a stand and trimmed shooting lanes," Patrick said. "And then as I was leaving, I met a neighbor who told me about a big deer that was shot on opening day, about 250 yards south of that property.

"It had been raining and cold on opening day, and there was still a lot of standing corn," he continued. "I'd seen a parked truck and thought the guy was wasting his time, but that's who shot the big buck. I went back that afternoon and pulled the stand."

The Wellman, Iowa, bowhunter was understandably disappointed. Time is precious, considering the countless hours he devotes to his own construction business and his duties coaching soccer, baseball and wresting teams. The 42-year-old outdoorsman treasures his time in the woods. And he knew that with the big buck gone, he wouldn't feel the same about the 2004 archery season.

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It was opening day of Indiana's 2006 gun season, and Johnny Thacker was hunting with his cousin, Randy Buttery, Randy's sons Andy and Jason, and his brother-in-law, Pedy. The group leases 120 acres in southern Indiana that border a large state-owned tract. Lots of deer travel back and forth across the property, especially when the firearms season is under way.

"I was in a 17-foot ladder stand that I had used several weekends during bow season," Johnny said. "It's a great spot, about 60 yards into a wooded area from the edge of a cornfield. I could see the corn stubble from my stand as I watched the gully that ran down from the field to my left. At the bottom of the gully is a small stream."

Johnny, who lives in Ohio, had spent the previous night at Randy's home, which is much closer to the lease and allowed for more sleep. The whole crew was at the leased farm well before daybreak.

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Nov. 18, 2006, was just another morning to go deer hunting for me, though I'd had considerably less sleep than usual. Instead of counting sheep, I'd counted mileposts all the way from Mississippi to Indiana.

I have hunted Crawford County, Ind., for probably 10 years and harvested my share of trophy whitetails. There is probably no one who knows those woods better than I do.

I got in a couple of weeks of bowhunting that year before my job took me to Mississippi. I hunted morning and evening during that time and saw some really nice bucks, none of which were big enough to tempt me. I knew there were some great deer there.

After that, I took a job in Mississippi and had to abandon my hunting spot for the rest of the early bow season. But when November came around, I told my superintendent I was going back to Indiana to hunt for a week. I left late on Friday, Nov. 17.

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Ohio hunter David Cain was in a deer drought, much of it self-imposed. In 2002, he'd arrowed a BTR 12-pointer with split brow tines. But since then, he'd been passing up inferior bucks. 

"My family hunts on a 150-acre farm, and we've been managing it for big bucks," Dave said. "We've taken many does, and it took about six years for us to start to see the big bucks."

Dave's 2005 archery season was laced with sightings of a quality buck.

"I saw that buck half a dozen times during bow season, but the closest was about 80 yards," he said. "It didn't respond to calls, although I tried everything.

"Right before the rut, I saw it through binoculars, very far away, and I wasn't sure how big it was," he added. "Then when I saw it at 80 yards, I judged it to be at least a 140- or 150-incher."

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You'd think that a couple of bowhunters who planned for every conceivable circumstance when packing for a four-day, out-of-state hunt would have pored over maps or at least discussed the lay of the land during the nine-hour drive. Yet for all the planning, all the packing and all the fuss, the itinerary for day one was amazingly -- almost alarmingly -- simple.

When Aaron Burke and Johnny Mitchell arrived in Knox County, Ohio, that first afternoon back in November 2003, Johnny already knew where he wanted to go. The trip had been his idea; the farm belonged to his family. But his instructions to Aaron were far less specific.

"Just walk down that road and find you a place," Johnny told Aaron, who had never hunted deer outside of his native North Carolina.

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"Limpy" first appeared in Don Ehling's Hamilton, Ohio, neighborhood five years ago. The young doe's hind leg had been broken at some point. It had healed, but was essentially useless. Crippled, but by no means barren, Limpy enjoys a protected status among the 18 families who live there.

She feeds in the yards daily, and shows little fear of her human benefactors.

The horseshoe-shaped neighborhood surrounds a deep wooded depression with a creek at its center. Most of the lots are big, between 5 and 6 acres, and branch away from the drainage like spokes on a wheel.

Whenever Don, 70, wants to hunt close to home, he'll take his bow into the hub. He isn't the only hunter who ventures in there, but he has more time than most. Being retired has its advantages.

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Opening day of Missouri's 2006 rifle season was really sweet. Not only did I fill my doe tag (ending my deer drought from '05), but my cousin Matt also shot a great 9-pointer. Even my 10-year-old nephew, Colton, got in on the action, taking his first deer ever.

I will never forget the moment that Colton stripped down to his tee-shirt and rolled up his sleeves. Brandishing his new hunting knife, he announced, "I'll field-dress her, Grandpa!"

After that evening's family celebration, I asked my sister, Crissy, where she and my brother-in-law, Tom, would be hunting the next morning, a Sunday. They had planned to hunt our parents' property, too. Because I sing in our church's praise team, I had to be in from hunting early enough to get ready and be at church in time for practice.

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Calvin Mauch knew the buck had not been fooled, even though the hunter had been careful to belly-crawl along the top of the earthen dam. He wondered if his brazen attempt to get closer to the bedded buck had been in vain. If the buck bolted -- as Calvin was sure it would, at any moment -- could he rise up from his prone position quickly enough to make an accurate shot at a running target?

Calvin had just seconds to calm his nerves and steady his 7mm rifle. Worse yet, his young nephew, Blair, was watching from a short distance away. 

No pressure.

Back when Calvin's great grandfather first homesteaded a patch of grassy land in North Dakota, white-tailed deer were not seen in those parts. Now, four generations later, Calvin farms and ranches 700 acres where his forefather staked a claim in the beautiful Western wilderness.

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After twice bumping a 10-pointer that was every bit of 40 inches BIGGER than the 130ish 4x4 he'd shot during his trip to Illinois in 2003, Carson Bradford was painfully aware of how short three days can be. That's how long the state's first (of two) shotgun season lasts.

It's hard to rebound from such a misstep when you're trying to attach a tag on a mature buck.

This was the 28-year-old Tennessean's fourth visit to the Promised Land of deer hunting. He'd been hoping for a chance at a 150-class whitetail.

Carson and his dad, Steve, left Tennessee on the morning of Nov. 17, 2005, the day before the opener. They arrived in Schuyler County a few hours before dark with just enough time to do a little scouting. Their bowhunting buddies had enjoyed the run of the place for a week.

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The first time that Robbie Heyes encountered a real Massachusetts wallhanger, back in 2003, a misfire rained on the 20-year-old's parade. The following year, it was indeed the rain, not his deer gun, which doused the young man.

The misfire came when Robbie was slipping quietly through a swamp. He'd unknowingly wandered within 30 feet of a bedded 10-pointer. When it rose and tried to sneak away, Robbie shouldered his muzzleloader, braced for the blast and squeezed the trigger.

Instead of a boom, however, he heard only a soft click. The gun never went off, but the buck did.

"I thought about it all the time after that," Robbie said. "Every time we hunted in that area, I went to that spot -- my favorite -- and thought about that day."

The following year, Robbie planned his vacation around the December shotgun season so that he and his dad, Don, could hunt every day.

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My 2005 bow season got off to a very slow start. By Thursday, Nov. 9, two days before Indiana opened the doors to shotgunners, I'd seen nothing of note. Sure, I'd watched a lot of small deer: does, button bucks and about a dozen adolescent bucks. I was even starting to name them.

I had seen some of the same deer so often and so close that I could have jumped out of the tree and landed on them. My favorites were Moe, Larry and Curly. And then there was Abbott and Costello, a pair of 7-pointers who might have been twins.

The deer I was looking for, though, was named Ziggy. That was the nickname my friends and I had used, year after year, for the most dominant buck in the area.

Since Indiana law changed to allow the taking of only one buck per year, I was holding out for a good one, a "Ziggy," so to speak.

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After a long hiatus from hunting, I decided to give bowhunting a try back in 2000. I'd taken several deer with a shotgun as a teenager.

Since most of the places I had access to hunt were at least an hour from my home in Hartville, Ohio, I sought permission from local farmers. After half a dozen unsuccessful tries, I finally met a gentleman kind enough to allow me on his 80 acres, after the hunters who usually hunted there didn't show.

When the '01 season opened, I was confident that I'd tag my first deer with a bow. I'd come to know the property through scouting and had found the perfect place for a stand, about 30 yards from multiple creek crossings between a bedding area and a soybean field. After hunting there the first four weeks and seeing only a few does, however, I decided a move was in order.

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My trip to Illinois last year got off to a rough start.

A couple of weeks before my brother, Derek, and I left, I studied topo maps to get a feel for the property we'd be hunting -- land that our outfitter had leased. When we arrived, our host took us to the tract, and Derek and I spent two hours scouting and hanging stands for the afternoon hunt.

On our way back to the vehicle, we saw another truck barreling down the dirt road toward us. When it came to an abrupt stop, out jumped a little loud-mouthed guy from Pennsylvania, mad as a pit bull because we were on HIS property!
Turns out, he had bought the place the afternoon before we got there. 

Duly and overly chastised, my brother and I went back and retrieved our stands. The outfitter wound up taking us to a place we'd never hunted, although I'd seen a dandy buck chasing a doe in the middle of the road about a half-mile from there the previous year.

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Whenever my husband, Steve, gets the urge to go hunting, he doesn't have to go far. We live in rural Greenfield, Ill., on 37 acres. When the season is in, all he has to do is fire up the tractor and drive to the elevated stand he calls his "tree house."

That's exactly what he did during the November 2006 gun season, all three days. On Friday, he saw only does and yearlings. They were restless, often looking over their shoulders to check their backtrails. But Steve never saw the bucks he envisioned would come.

He didn't have time to go out again that afternoon. He and I run a home-based scheduling service for American Airlines flight attendants who work out of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. He spent the rest of the day working on their December schedules.

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Bob Cuozzo of Pine City, N.Y., began hunting deer when he was 12 years old in northern Pennsylvania. Leading up to the 2006 season, he'd bagged 53 bucks, everything from spikes to 10-pointers.

Last year's season was his best, even if he'd never ventured afield on Dec. 6. Early on, while hunting in Pennsylvania with his dad's bolt-action .308, he shot an 11-pointer - his biggest ever!

But not for long.

In preparation for New York's southern zone shotgun season, Bob sighted-in his new bolt-action shotgun with just four shots. After such a productive shooting session with his new deer gun, he was confident in his shooting ability for shot No. 5.

Bob hunts in the vast Region 8, one of the state's top deer zones. Western New York continues to lead the state in deer harvest densities. The county where Bob hunts yielded 1,232 bucks in 2006, or three bucks per square mile. One of those was Bob's. Bob's spirit was still soaring from his 11-point Pennsylvania buck when the New York season opened. The first week, during which he babysat stands within a QDM unit, was a bust. His game plan changed for the second week.

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I started deer hunting 24 years ago, after I got married. My wife's entire family hunts deer. Until then, I had not even thought about deer hunting. At that time, my wife's grandfather, Walter Boldridge Sr., was still around. He was great -- especially at the end of the day, when we would all meet back at his place to swap stories.

He got around on a walker, and, later, though he had been in a wheelchair in a nursing home, he was always ready to go out with the rest of the guys when hunting season started. I tell you about him because he really made the hunt fun.
My father-in-law, Walter Jr., is the same -- always ready with a story. But as any hunter will tell you, you do not have to actually bag a deer to have a great time hunting them.

Many of my memories are of just the different people with whom I have shared hunts. I really loved listening to my wife's grandpa. As I said, he could paint a great picture with his stories. He would also tell you where and how to set up, but many of his directions were sometimes hard to follow. He would talk of old logging roads and landmarks to look for in a particular strip of timber that were no longer there.

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The two men approached the downed buck cautiously, from different sides. Johnny King's bullets had dropped the enormous whitetail, but Brad Heisz, who'd answered his cousin's desperate call for help, had obligingly administered the coup de grace.

Brad reached it first, while Johnny was circling around in front. He knelt, grasped the unbelievably huge rack and lifted the head to admire it. At that moment, the buck propelled itself upward and twisted away from the wide-eyed hunter in a last-ditch effort to regain its footing.

Following a loud crack that would've brought a smile to Hank Aaron's face, Brad was left holding most of the left antler.
Johnny didn't realize that the buck, which never got its wheels back under it, was responsible. It appeared to him as if his crazed cousin, Bradzilla, had simply walked up and ripped off the antler.

"Brad, what the hell?" he asked, horrified.

Brad was speechless, looking at the rack as if he'd broken an arm off the statue of Venus.

It took a few minutes for the bewildered hunters to literally piece together the story.

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With ancestors like Davy Crockett and Sgt. Alvin York, hunters from the Volunteer State can claim a pretty good bloodline when it comes to hitting what they shoot at. So what happens when a bunch of guys from Tennessee travel to Illinois when the rut is in full swing? Well, for Jason Rhoton and his friends, the trip north in the fall of 2005 was not a dull one, that's for sure.

Jason and eight friends, all Tennesseans, leased 1,200 acres of farmland there in 2002. All three farms were in Cass County. The owner leased the property to other hunters during the bow season, but Jason and his pals had exclusive use of the farms during the shotgun seasons.

"We took some pretty good bucks during the first four years, but we didn't hit the rut just right (the firearms season fell afterward) until 2005," Jason related.

The group headed north on the morning of Nov. 16, a couple of days early. The three-day season opened on Friday.

"We like to go up early and stay in a motel, to use the day before the season opens to scout around and hang stands," Jason said. "That year, the weather was in the mid-20s -- perfect for hunting. David Dyer, Wayne Harper, Gene Patterson and I were going to hunt a 450-acre tract, while the rest of the guys split the other two areas.

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Story by Troy Seidel (As told by Lane Johnson)

BTR Score: 179

Photo: Lane Johnson and his friends might have unwillingly donated their venison to the coyotes in Saskatchewan last fall, but the three amigos left the province with three sets of antlers. Lane took the largest back home to North Dakota.

October 2006 marked the second time I'd hunted with Jim Lake Outfitters in Saskatchewan. It was my friend Don's 15th journey across the border for a week of goose and deer hunting.

The plan was to join friends on the decoyed fields in the mornings, and then finish our days in deer stands -- me and another buddy, Lynn, with muzzleloaders and Don with his bow.

My first stint was in a ground blind beside an alfalfa field. After seeing only a couple of does, I became restless and decided to stalk my way back to the drop-off point. En route, I took cover alongside some alfalfa bales and glassed for deer in the adjoining fields.

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Jody Spiers had endured a tough week behind the wheel of his logging truck. By Friday’s end, he’d put in 70 hours, and he was exhausted. He’d planned to sleep in until at least 7 a.m. that Saturday, Nov. 19, before hunting his parents’ land. With barely a week remaining in Maine’s 2005 rifle season, he was hoping to get a good deer for the family freezer.

But his cousin, Rodney Ouellette, had different plans.

At 5:30 a.m., Jody was awakened by his cousin, who excitedly told him that he had found the “perfect spot” to hunt that day.

Because Jody had moved to Saint Francis from Stacyville in July, he wasn’t familiar with the area. He trusted Rodney’s judgment completely. His cousin knew there was a big buck in a place he’d been scouting, and he was gung ho to shoot it. So after a hearty breakfast, the men were on their way.

There are many logging roads in the deep woods of the Allagash region. Where some of these roads converge, there are natural deer trails. The spot that Rodney had found was a big triangular piece of ground with deer tracks funneled into a ravine alongside a brook with thick cover and clear-cuts around all sides. It was a cold, crisp morning with a light breeze and a ground cover of about 6 inches of snow.

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Twenty-eight bowhunters were allowed into the 13,000-acre Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge in early January, having earned the coveted permits by harvesting “cull bucks” during the Sept. 30-Nov. 17 archery season.

To qualify as a cull, by the refuge’s standards, the buck had to be either a 1 1/2-year-old with five or fewer points or (minimum) 2 1/2-year-old with less than eight points.

The reward to those who succeeded was a weeklong jumpstart — a chance to hunt Mississippi’s oldest national wildlife refuge before it was reopened to all comers. From Jan. 2-7, the tail end of the rut in that part of the Delta, the place was theirs. On Jan. 8, the floodgates would open to a sea of bow-toting visitors.

Angus Catchot was among the 28. The contractor from Wiggins, Miss., has prowled the refuge for the past 16 years. Not happy with the 230-mile commute, he even built himself a second home at the nearby fish camp on Lake Washington.

“I’m there every week, 52 weeks a year,” he says. “I scout that place year ’round. Some days, I’ll walk three to four hours in the morning and another three or four in the evening.”

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After Labor Day, when most hunters focus on scouting and finding the perfect places for intercepting deer, Denny Kommes turns his attention to another kind of harvesting. For about 14 hours a day, he works on a crew combining corn and bean fields.

In addition to helping put vegetables on tables across America, the Exira, Iowa, hunter can also “bring home the bacon,” or in this case, venison. His work schedule means that he only gets to hunt one weekend a year. But in 2004, Denny made the most of his time in the field, knocking down a slammer that he’ll remember for all the weekends — and weekdays — of his life.

“We may chase out some deer while combining, but doing that kind of work doesn’t allow any time for scouting and not much time for hunting,” he said. “We start in September, and, usually, with 45 farms or so to do, we’re working through November, sometimes as many as 100 hours a week.”

Denny runs a piece of equipment called the auger wagon, which catches the harvest from the combining equipment and transfers it to trucks. In addition to running the wagon, he also tends to any mechanical problems.

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Missouri’s second rifle season was winding down as I shivered in my stand on Nov. 19, my mind elsewhere. I was thinking of the incredible buck I’d shot with my bow a couple of weeks earlier. The story appeared in this magazine last month.

Truthfully, I was just going through the motions. I regretted caping out my bow buck for a shoulder mount, deciding after the fact that it deserved nothing less than full-body treatment. My wife and I had rifle tags, though, and I was looking for a big-bodied whitetail — for its hide, not its rack. My taxidermist was on the lookout for a new set of clothes for my buck as well.

Saturday was a bust. When I returned to the woods Sunday morning, the temperature had warmed, and I saw several does before breaking for church and a bite to eat. I was back in a stand, this time about 500 yards from where I’d arrowed my big buck, around 3 p.m.

Fifteen minutes after settling in, I heard a buck grunting. The accompanying ruckus sounded like it was chasing a doe. The rut was still going on there. The deer were just out of sight in the thick timber. I was then fortunate enough to hear the new sound everyone is talking about, the “buck growl.”

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Jimmy Ray Eppley, at the young age of 15, feels like he is a seasoned hunter. Having hunted since age 7 and harvesting sufficient venison to feed the family at least twice per month for the last six seasons, he is a proud young man.

His first deer in 1999 was a 5-pointer, followed in 2002 by a 7-pointer (with a 17 1/2-inch inside spread). In 2004, he shot an 8-pointer. And he’s taken several does in between. None of these, however, will be as fondly remembered as the ’05 season’s bounty.

“I thought it was a big 10-pointer, but I couldn’t see it clearly,” Jimmy admitted. “I had a hole the size of a quarter and only a neck shot. I squeezed the trigger, and, even in the smoke, I could see the tail twitching. I knew I got it!”

Jimmy left his rifle and ran to the deer lying in the small creek.

“After that, I just ran back to the truck to get my Grandpa, but I couldn’t find him. So I got a knife and ran back to the deer, but it was GONE!” he added.

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By the time the buddies met at midday on Nov. 15, 2003, to discuss plans for the afternoon, the wind had already kicked up enough to rattle the windows and door on the old trailer. The 30- to 40-mph gusts were seriously dampening their opening-day enthusiasm.

Jeff Foskey spent the morning watching a couple of does in a food plot, and he had no qualms about resuming the vigil that afternoon, in the same homemade stand. But when his friend, John Walls, said that he’d been feeling sick and was considering heading home, Jeff offered to let him finish the day in his food plot stand.

John declined, however, so Jeff returned to it.

“It had gotten so windy that I had almost decided not to go myself,” Jeff said. “But it was opening day, and I don’t get a lot of time to hunt.”

The 39-year-old works two jobs, one as a correctional officer at a state prison, the other as proprietor of his own lawn and landscaping business. It’s a wonder he found the time the previous summer to fool with his food plot, a mix of oats, alfalfa and clover.

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With maps in hand and a tank full of gas, this truckload of Texans discovered what public ground in Kansas has to offer.

Judging from the drool stains on the truck’s upholstery, you’d think that a pack of St. Bernards had crowded into the vehicle with Texas plates.

Instead, it was a few friends with time on their hands, driving around and looking for deer on the day before the 2006 Kansas firearms season opened. And if anyone had been behind Marc Barnes and his pals that morning on the Jewell County roadway, they’d have rear-ended the truck that came to a screeching halt about 7:30.

Seeing a world-class whitetail with a rack sporting a sapling-thick drop tine is reason enough to risk whiplash and an increase in auto insurance premiums. The sighting left the group of Texans slack-jawed and eager to begin their planned weeklong hunt.

Marc, who had never hunted in Kansas before, didn’t care if they saw anything else. Totally smitten with that buck, he was prepared to stare at the same 4-acre woodlot for days on end — forsaking it for only a motel room pillow.

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By Mike Handley

Photo: Sixteen-year-old Cameron Bunting of Deville, La., gained a sixth notch in his bowhunting belt last November. He waited six days for the 10-minute window to shut out this 15-pointer's lights.

Ordinarily, anyone who has traveled across four states to climb a tree where bruiser bucks roam would rise with the roosters. But that wasn’t the case when 16-year-old Cameron Bunting crawled out of the sack on Nov. 9, six days into his fall vacation.

Cameron’s enthusiasm for rising before dawn was definitely waning. The hunting party — which included his dad, Greg, cousin Doug Bell and another guy, Reggie Yancy — was one day away from calling it quits and heading the 17 hours back home to Louisiana. Almost everyone else had drawn blood, and the kid, understandably, was ready to write off the 2006 season.

That he had a stomach ache that day was plenty enough reason to hang around camp for a few extra hours.

The trip to Ohio is an annual pilgrimage for the Buntings, who usually are accompanied by two or three others. They go to a cabin in Pike County, near the public ground they’ve come to know very well. As soon as they hit town, there’s always a trip to Wal-Mart for over-the-counter licenses.

Cameron slept in that Thursday morning. His one and only vigil wouldn’t begin until much later in the day, and he was definitely looking forward to a change of scenery, eager to take his dad’s advice and hunt an area five minutes away that always seemed to hold a few does.

Around 4 p.m., the well rested hunter climbed off his ATV and began the 80-yard hike from the gravel road to his stand. It was three hours later than his usual afternoon starting time.

Greg had gone so far as to suggest a particular tree, but Cameron didn’t like it when he got an up-close look at things. He wound up going 80 yards deeper into the open hardwoods, until he stumbled across a fresh scrape.

A buck had left a ripe calling card, and Cameron decided to answer it.

As soon as he was about 35 to 40 feet high in an oak, he flipped his doe-in-a-can twice and grunted. Almost immediately, he heard a deer approaching. Moments later, the kid zeroed in on its antlers.

“I didn’t think it was all THAT big,” he admitted. “I thought that it was just a nice 8-pointer.”

When the “nice” animal was within 40 yards less than five minutes later, Cameron bleated again. When the buck stopped, the kid’s bow hummed.

The deer ran about 50 yards after the thwack, and then its right front leg folded inward, sending it sprawling. Woozy, but still full of adrenaline, the buck managed to rise again and covered another 50 yards before calmly lying down and taking its last breath.

Cameron didn’t realize until he was standing over the fallen whitetail that it was far bigger than the bragging-sized bucks the others had taken during the week. Instead of eight points, it wore 15 (eight on the right side alone).

The 10-minute hunt was almost surreal, especially considering that Cameron had taken only one buck and a few does in the eight seasons leading up to that day.

BTR Score: 162 2/8

–Mike Handley

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Richard Caro might not have received a come-get-me letter from his son, Bradley, postmarked from Camp Granada. But he did get three telephone calls in less than an hour on Dec. 7, 2006.

The first time, Bradley was ready for someone to come get him. He called back a few minutes later to say that he’d changed his mind, or words to that effect. And maybe a half-hour after that, he didn’t know whether he was coming or going.

Bradley isn’t a kid; he’s a 29-year-old equipment salesman. Neither was he suffering through his first day at summer camp, like the young protagonist in the old Allan Sherman song, “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.” It was indeed the first day of a father-son vacation, but he was savoring it — especially by the time he called his dad for the third time.

Deer Hunting Vacation
The Caros left Biloxi, Miss. (Bradley’s home), on Tuesday, Dec. 5, and drove 12 hours to St. Louis, where they spent the night in a motel. The next morning, they crossed the river for the first time ever into Illinois, bound for Adams County.

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Choosing a piece of public ground to hunt deer in Kentucky is fairly easy. Narrowing the list of 88 wildlife management areas down to those most likely to harbor wallhangers requires a little homework.

That was Mervin Yoder’s job in 2006, and he did it by studying the state’s annual hunting guide. He looked at locations, hunt dates and the rules and regulations before locking in on those places offering quota hunts — days set aside for a specific number of hunters, whose names are drawn by lottery.

Number 18 on the list was the Pennyrile State Forest and Tradewater Wildlife Management Area about two hours west of Mervin’s home. According to the publication, 758 hunters had applied the previous year for the 300 available slots at Pennyrile.

Mervin was the point man for a group of friends from the Amish community near Horse Cave, Ky. They all wanted nice bucks. One of the guys, Dan Miller, had even suggested they visit someplace with an antler restriction, and the Pennyrile hunt was among several in which bucks must have a minimum outside antler spread of 15 inches.

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On Sept. 16, opening morning of Minnesota’s archery season, Al Schmidt, Paul Appicelli, Clarence Bautch and I met long before sunrise by the old schoolhouse. We then separated and headed for our chosen positions.

It took me nearly half an hour of noisily thrashing through the forest to find my treestand. Needless to say, I did not see or hear any deer that morning. But Al and his daughter, Morgan, shot and dressed out a nice buck.

After church the next morning, we set out again. The three of us were soon aloft in trees, spread out over a heavily wooded valley between the steep bluffs of southeastern Minnesota.

After an hour of listening to the sounds of the woods and reading a new book, Steve Chapman’s “A Look at Life from a Tree Stand,” I was startled by the sound of deer on the move. Somewhere directly behind me was the distinct pattern of hooves meeting leaves. Acorns had been falling and squirrels rustling, but this was different. It had the all-too-familiar cadence.

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On Friday, Oct. 27, 2006, my husband and I were the coordinators of a "permit-only" archery deer removal at a 1,000-acre regional park in a northern suburb of the Twin Cities Metro area. We had 15 other hunters in the woods, all in stands they'd selected.

I set up my stand around noon that day, getting in and out of the woods as quickly and quietly as I could, leaving as little scent as possible. I returned and was hunting in it by 3:50 p.m., safety harness securely attached. It was a beautiful late fall afternoon, cool, with a light wind blowing steadily out of the southeast.

After waiting for the woods to settle around me, I began flipping my Primos Original Can call.

About a half-hour later, I heard the cattails rattling and looked to my right. Fifty yards away, there was a beautiful, mature 10-point buck slowly making its way toward the higher ground where I was. It took a few steps, raked its antlers in the brush, and then I bleated some more.

No doubt, this guy was a "shooter." The rack had more mass, and the tines were longer than those forming the 131-inch buck I had taken a few years back.

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His name was Dave. We hunted together back in the '70s in eastern Alberta before the western Canada whitetail boom. Dave was as happy as a clam just to get a deer.

I guess I never met a more enthusiastic hunter. He had never taken what we might call a real trophy buck -- mostly just little ones -- but he didn't give a hoot. He was hunting, and that was all that mattered.

Then one fall before the hunting season opened, Dave declared that would be his year for a trophy. "A monster buck or nothing," he vowed. And so the quest began.

Dave hunted harder than he had ever hunted and saw less deer than he'd ever seen. And no big bucks! By the end of the season, he was a nervous wreck. It was as if his manhood was somehow threatened if he didn't succeed. And he didn't. After that, Dave lost interest in hunting altogether. He had burdened himself with priorities that weren't really his. He was hunting with imposed expectations that were not his own.

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"Thanks, old man."

I wasn't talking to my father, but to the gray-muzzled buck that I had just harvested. As I knelt next to the massive and remarkable animal, I couldn't believe that my quest for it had ended.

Two years earlier, I'd noticed some wooden fence posts that were almost rubbed in two. I knew that only a hoss could do that much damage to them. During the next several weeks, however, I never saw a deer big enough to have reduced a fence post to a toothpick.

The next season, I noticed fresh rubs along the same fence line. From the looks of it, they'd been visited frequently. Once again, the excitement came back to me.

During the last weekend of the 2004 hunting season, I was out doing some chores, checking the fence and such with my father, Lee, and our good friend, Mike. We called ourselves the three amigos, jokingly, all dressed to match in our blaze orange, in case we stumbled across a good buck.

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The third week of October 2006, one of my trail cameras photographed a huge mainframe 10-pointer with matching sticker points off the bases, making it a 6x6. The buck was living on or at least passing through the farm I knew better than any of the places I hunt.

I had tromped around that farm ever since I was old enough to walk.

I discussed strategies with my dad, and we agreed that my best chance of tagging it would be before the rut. If the buck got hooked up with a doe, there was no telling how far it might wander.

I knew I had to hunt this deer smarter than any other I'd hunted. This was going to be tough. I knew if it caught my scent one time, the game was probably over for me.

I decided not to bother this deer until the wind was absolutely perfect. It would take a northwest wind to hunt this particular farm. I tell you, it was hard not visiting this place, knowing what was there. But I knew I couldn't until the time was right. I just hoped the time would come soon.

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