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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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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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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A roadrunner seemed to materialize in front of our ATV, playfully running alongside the vehicle with a dead lizard dangling from its beak. It paralleled our path awhile, and then angled back into the West Texas brush, the tail of its scaly breakfast flopping with every stride.

I laughed at the sight and pointed it out to my driver and guide, Hunter Ross of Desert Safaris. The funny-looking critter was nothing new to the native Texan, but it was pretty darn cool to me.

I said, "In Alabama, you don't see those things everyday."

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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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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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Short of an emergency, there was only one reason for my wife to call home on the day she'd gone to town to get prints of whatever my trail camera had photographed. I tensed when the telephone rang.

"There are a bunch of does, fawns and one big buck," she reported. "It's really wide and has a lot of points."

Not sure whether or not to believe her, I had to wait almost an hour and a half for her to get home so I could see for myself. When she finally arrived, I tore into the envelope. Sure enough, she was right. The rack was big, wide and had lots of points, just like she'd said.

My brother, Travis, and I hung a stand in a travel corridor between a bedding area and a milo field. I also scouted several other pieces of my ground in hopes of stumbling across another big whitetail or mule deer.

When the season opened Sept. 15, I awoke at 3:30 a.m. to thunder, lightning and rain. By 5:30, it had quit raining and I was dressed and ready for action. On my way to the corridor stand, I triggered my trail camera. After the flash, I froze and waited for about 15 minutes.

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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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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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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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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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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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Chris Chastain looked like he was about to be sick. I'm usually not superstitious, but the turbulence en route to Montreal was rough indeed, and I hoped it wasn't a sign of things to come on the tundra, which is an ancient Sami-Russian word meaning "flat-topped hill."

Well, Quebec's share of tundra, the mostly treeless region between the icecap and the Arctic tree line, is dense with beauty and life. I figure the Sami weren't thinking tourism when they coined the word.

Chris, my dad, Russell, and I overnighted in Montreal before flying to Kujjuak, where we boarded a tundra-bound puddle-jumper.

My view of said tundra, out the float plane window, revealed muskox, wolves and huge groups of caribou -- of the Leaf River herd -- all going somewhere at a measured pace. And so were we. The skilled pilot touched the skids down nicely on the waters of Charlie Lake. The camp cabins were warm, showers hot and kitchen smells inviting. But we were there to hunt caribou, not to sit around and eat. Not yet. Guide Bucky Adams quickly clued us in to an area across the lake, where they'd been seeing some good bulls.

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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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