It wasn't too much later when I heard a couple of shots in the direction the deer had headed. I found out later that Gary had been tracking a doe and buck at the same time, he had been the one I heard shooting. He said the buck had been standing up the mountain about a hundred yards away when he shot. He noticed the buck had an exceptionally wide spread. He had followed the two deer over the top of the mountains, into a large basin covering a good distance of the 3900 feet elevation mountain. He was not able to get another sighting, so he decided to head out a bit earlier, knowing it may take longer to find the way out of unfamiliar woods.

       I, too, didn't fair much better for the day and joined Gary at the vehicle, looking forward to hot food and a chance to recharge our systems for the next day.

       Sunday morning we entered the woods with three inches of fresh snow that had fallen during the night. Once again the tracking was excellent, except for the fact that the snow had stopped during the night so the deer had plenty of time to track things up before daybreak. Well, every hunter knows that there are always going to be some sort of obstacles, but they always hope for the perfect conditions.

       Gary decided he was going to head south east and I decided to walk south up the mountain. It wasn't too long before I came upon a track made by a medium buck, maybe four hours earlier. He was heading up the mountain, the same direction I was traveling; I decided to follow along. An old track can become real fresh when the deer is jumped from his bed. Gary tells of the freshest track as being the one with deer standing in it. I tend to agree!

       I had been following along for about two hundred yards when the track turned and headed east. I continued south hoping to find a fresh trophy track. I hadn't gone three hundred yards when I found the track of a buck that might go 200 pounds. It was what I'd been hoping for. He had come down off a brushy knob and was cruising through some open hardwoods. I stopped to take the sling off my rifle, change from mittens to gloves, and clean the snow from my scope before starting off on the track. As he went into a gully, I noticed more tracks accompanied his. I wasn't sure if they were from the deer I had been following earlier or another. I searched out the freshest, largest track I could find and followed it up the mountain.

       The buck back-tracked a good thirty feet on his own track; we were heading near the edge of some pretty steep terrain. It was quite rocky and there were some small saplings; not the best walking. I was thinking that he might be bedded close by. Sure enough, I came upon his bed which he had scrambled out of. He hadn't bounded away so I was thinking that he probably wasn't sure what it was that had startled him. It was foggy, reducing my visibility, so I crouched slightly as I slid each foot into the snow, trying not to make any noise. As I came over a small rise, I looked down through the hardwoods. Fifty yards away I could see the front half of the buck standing broad side looking up the mountain. Even through everything happened so fast, I'll never forget how majestic he looked standing there in my snow and fog. His right antler beam protruded out in front of him and I could see the long tines branching upward from it A perfect picture of a trophy buck in the North Woods.

       I figured if I got my 30-06 bullet into him, behind the front shoulder, way up here in the White Mountains, on snow -- i'd have him before the day was through. I had to hurry the shot, but as soon as the cross-hairs were focused behind his front shoulder, I fired. He went off his feet and landed against a Rock Maple tree. He got up and disappeared straight down the mountain.

       I ejected the empty cartridge from my Remington pump and ran as fast as possible down to where the buck had fallen. There was some hair but no blood that I could see until I started to follow him, then I could see a few drops. I figured by the way he was running that he was hit hard.

       I try to keep one cartridge in the chamber and four in the clip but when I stopped to replace the one I had fired, I noticed the clip was full. The second shell hadn't fed into the chamber. I had that happen once before when I was shooting at a running buck in Maine a few years before. It's an awful feeling to have a nice buck in your scope only to have the firing pin land on an empty chamber.

       As I was reloading, I heard two shots about a hundred and fifty yards below me. I was hoping it was Gary, for he had headed in that direction earlier in the morning. I wasn't three minutes behind the wounded buck when I jumped off a bank onto a wood road. It was then I saw some stranger standing next to my buck. What a sick feeling. When I got down to where the buck lay, the guy said he had heard me shoot, then saw a big deer running down by him. He said the deer wasn't running like a deer can run. The buck had come onto the road, running down it in front of him. He shot, knocking the deer down, then jumped off the bank and shot the buck again in the neck.

       I walked up to the animal, noticing where I had hit high behind the front shoulder. The buck was an eight-pointer. His beautiful rack had an incredible spread that could easily fit my rifle, from the barrel to the end of the clip magazine near the trigger guard, within the beams. Later I transferred my field "measurement" to twenty-two inches and found out the deer weighed 197.5 pounds.

       At first the guy offered me some meat, but I declined. What I really wanted was the whole deer. Any deer I harvest is always used to the fullest capacity by our family, but for so long I had been hunting for an animal of this magnificence; "meat" wasn't going to soothe the feelings in my gut.

       He then offered me a can of beer, apparently he had carried some in his fanny-pack. I said, "No thanks!", personally I think that hunting and alcohol do not mix.' This guy had been "hunting" for twelve days and hadn't seen a deer. For some unlucky reason, he happened onto mine. I can't imagine he'd be very proud of how he had acquired this buck. Hunting the rest of the day was the farthest thing from my mind after that, so I headed back out of the woods, taking my time getting back to the truck.

       Gary had seen four deer that day, but nothing he wanted to take. We both had to head to work the next day, so we started home. On the way we talked of hunting the next and final weekend, but the way I was feeling at that moment was pretty sick; even though I felt pretty certain there was another, better buck there, by the size of the tracks I had seen that weekend. I love tracking a trophy buck through the big woods, but after that day I really wasn't feeling like going back.

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