Western Kentucky has some outstanding deer country, and in the past several years the commonwealth has produced some tremendous whitetail bucks.

I was sure it was the kind of buck I was looking for. I was equally sure he was going to cross the cut, but this late in the morning I was just as certain that he was unlikely to tarry. I put down the binoculars and took a careful rest with the .300 Jarrett. There was no time to range the shot, but he was just this side of the limit of my vision, which I knew to be a bit over 300 yards.

The buck stepped into the opening, walking fast with hardly a dozen yards of open ground to cover. He hesitated for a moment just at the far edge, and I got the shot off, but I knew he'd stepped again just as the trigger broke, so the hit was far back. I'd marked the spot well, and we found him fairly quickly, thanks in no small part to the fast-opening Nosler Ballistic Tip.

He was a big, handsome 11-pointer--a darned good southern whitetail--but he was neither as big nor as old as I'd judged him to be. So, nice buck or not, he was a mistake.

A short while later, in early November, I found myself in western Kentucky with the Thompson/Center folks. In all my years, I doubt that I have ever had conditions as perfect as they were on Kentucky's opening day of rifle season.

The moon was dark. The air was crisp and cold, below average for the time of year. It had rained a couple of days previously, but opening morning was calm and clear, and the rut was in full swing. Together with several of my Primedia colleagues I was hunting R&W Game Trails' property near Sturgis, ideal whitetail country along the Ohio River. The evening before I asked Larry and my guide, Mark Doerner, what I could expect.

They told me there were two exceptionally large and mature eight-pointers in the area I'd be hunting, but there were also at least two other much larger bucks--a 10-pointer and a typical 12-pointer--and almost certainly there were other mature bucks that had never been seen.

In the cold dark, I found my stand and clambered up the ladder. I shivered in the dark for most of an hour. As the light grew, I understood that my stand was on a timbered ridge looking down into a hollow. I shivered for another half-hour, and then I heard faint rustling as several does approached from my left. They browsed almost under my stand while I held my breath and stayed perfectly still for long minutes.

While this is a fine example of a mature whitetail from southern Georgia, Boddington believes he misjudged the buck, thinking it was older than it really was.

Soon after they moved on, I heard a rustling over my right shoulder. Slowly, I turned my head and caught the glint of a white antler. The buck was mostly hidden, so I got my binoculars on him. He was the biggest eight-point whitetail I have ever seen, massive, heavy, bone-white antlers with long beams and tall points. He moved this way and that, and I saw that his body was equally massive.

He worked his way in a semicircle around my stand, at one point coming within 25 yards of my tree perch. I never raised the rifle. Yes, I was there to hunt deer, but it was opening morning, I had a week to play with, and the thought of those 10- and 12-point bucks just wouldn't go away. And yet, even though I wasn't prepared to shutter the hunt on the first day, after he was gone I knew I'd probably blown it.

That evening I sat in a different stand just a few hundred yards away, overlooking a little alcove in a contoured field with thick woods behind me and curving around the field to my right and left. The day had warmed considerably, which I didn't like, and I saw nothing until a half-hour before sundown.

Then I started hearing vague scratching in the carpet of leaves behind me, and deer started to filter into the field. Just before sunset there were four young bucks and a couple of does in the field, and then I heard more noise directly behind me. Moments later a buck walked right under my ladder stand. It was another huge, mature eight-pointer, although this one had walnut colored antlers that were not quite as heavy as the previous deer's but wider, with noticeably longer beams. My guess is the buck I saw in the morning would have scored no less than 160, and this one was well into the 150s.