I figured 2004 would be my Year of the Whitetail--a big whitetail, that is. I don't live in whitetail country, so getting to them takes a bit of effort and planning. But whitetail hunting is important to me, so I usually spend at least a week chasing them somewhere each fall.

2004 ended up being different. Through a fortunate series of events, I wound up hunting whitetails for the best part of a month. Surely, this would be the fall that I'd come up with the buck of a lifetime.

My season began in South Carolina, hunting with Kenny Jarrett of Beanfield Rifle fame. I'd been trying to get out his way during deer season for quite some time, and in late October, I found myself on a whitetail stand at Kenny's Cowden Plantation. South Carolina has plenty of deer but isn't known for huge bucks. So while I had no expectations of a monster, I did hope to wring out a Jarrett rifle on a respectable buck--or two or three, South Carolina having no limit on the number of deer you can kill.

On Cowden Plantation a buck must have a 16-inch outside spread before you can kill it. I didn't plan to be picky beyond that, so I expected success. On the other hand, we're dealing with whitetails, and the cover is incredibly thick, the swamps nearly impenetrable. If the deer aren't moving, there isn't much you can do about it.

And the deer weren't moving, at least not in the daylight, and I didn't blame them. A week earlier it had been cooler and there had been some good pre-rut action. But while I was there it turned hot and sultry, with temperatures soaring into the 80s. I sat in the woods, and I sat over soybean fields. There was plenty of sign, and I saw a few does, but I didn't have to worry about that 16-inch spread rule because I never saw a buck to shoot.

I relearned an old, old lesson: Even in a very good place, whitetail hunting is tough when the conditions aren't right. All you can do is try.

Kenny had business to tend to, so I hunted--fruitlessly--right up to the last minute, then we threw our stuff in his truck and headed to Zack Aultman's place in the tall pines of south Georgia.

It was even warmer down there, but the deer were moving. The primary cover in this area, mature pine forest, is quite sterile, so the deer must move to the edges to feed.

The first evening I sat in a tall tower overlooking a vast, open power line right-of-way well-sprinkled with food plots. The right-of-way was 200 yards across and endless from right to left. I could see in either direction well beyond the limit of 10X binoculars.

The deer didn't move until late, but when they started to appear, there were plenty--at least a half-dozen bucks within shooting range. As Kenny Jarrett had promised, this place was special. So I wasn't tempted right away. A couple of the bucks were promising eight-pointers, and one was a young 10-point. But we had time, and my goal was a fully mature racked-up whitetail.

I sat the power line again in the morning, but fog hung thick and heavy, reducing visibility to a few yards. It stayed that way until nearly nine o'clock, when a promising buck trotted out of the tree line about 200 yards to my left. I put down the binoculars and reached for the .300 Jarrett, but when I cheeked the rifle the buck was gone, vanished into the fog.

At dawn Zack had seen a pretty good buck cross at a different stand, so he put me there, where I stuck it out the next few days. I lost count of the number of bucks I saw. Late on my last morning, looking down a long, narrow cut through pine forest, I saw movement far down on the right side. The buck was tending a scrape, and I couldn't see him clearly through the foliage. What I could see was a clean picket fence of antler points, with just the hint of matching points on the other side.