Earlier last year I heard from my old friend and high school classmate Rex Morgan. As you get older these little reunions become more unusual. It had, after all, been thirty-seven years since I'd seen Rex.

Illustration by David Rottinghaus

Rex was a football player, and he was "cool." I was a bit of a nerd, and I was not cool. Rex, though he was cool, was one of the good guys. Turns out he still is, except he doesn't play football anymore. He wound up in Rawlins, Wyoming, where his job with the railroad gives him time to outfit pronghorn and mule deer hunts. So I applied and drew, and Rex and I hunted pronghorns together just a few days ago as I write this.

We had a perfect hunt and took a couple of good ones, and at the tail end we wound up at Rex's house, where he showed me a few of his trophies. He had some really good pronghorns and a huge Wyoming moose. Like any good Kansas boy, he had some nice whitetails, too. Except that he saved the best for last. Separate from the rest, he had the kind of whitetail anyone would die for.

I think you'd call it a typical 14-pointer, but it had lots of junk besides. You know, extra stuff that some people would call "kickers," others would call "deducts" and still others would recognize as "nontypical points." Any whitetail buck that makes Boone & Crockett's minimum for inclusion into the organization's all-time records book is a great whitetail. This was one of those incredibly rare bucks that would make it either as a typical or a nontypical, with plenty to spare either way. Such a buck is truly the trophy of a lifetime and the kind of thing you rarely see in even the most extensive collections of globetrotting hunters.

Case in point: You will not see such a buck among my own trophies. It is not entirely for lack of effort. I do not consider myself a whitetail expert, but I love whitetail hunting, and over the course of many years I have hunted them in many good places. We all know that the best place to hunt whitetails is always in your own backyard, but since I haven't lived in whitetail country for many years, I've had the luxury of picking some good spots and trying my luck. Provided I qualify the comment with key modifiers like "free range," "open season" and "legal shooting hours," I have never seen such a buck.

We are blessed with the whitetail deer. More than any other animal on Earth, his tribe keeps our sport vibrant and alive. Every fall millions of hunters pursue millions of whitetail deer. There are many great places to hunt whitetails and many great bucks. Reality, however, is that a buck like my friend Rex Morgan took in central Kansas is just one buck out of perhaps a million antlered deer. Putting together that one buck in a million with any one given hunter (like me!) is, well, sort of like winning the lottery. Except that I can honestly say I have never purchased a lottery ticket--but I do hunt whitetail deer every fall.

You see, in my mind it isn't exactly like winning the lottery. It does take a big smile from Dame Fortune to put a given hunter in the presence of such a rare buck. Our whitetail is secretive enough and adaptable enough that this can happen almost anywhere, but without question some areas tend to produce bigger bucks than others. So it's possible to, figuratively, purchase additional chances in the lottery by hunting good country. Bonus tickets come from sticking with it and hunting smart and well.