The Author shares his innermost musings about hunting whitetails...and a certain Great Buck!

What has come to be called "horn rattling" (even though we Texans do know the difference between antlers and horns) has an interesting history–and an even more interesting present! Strange things happen when a fellow goes out and beats a pair of antlers together, if everything is right. If everything is wrong, of course, nothing happens, but when conditions are favorable, strange, wild, hilarious, and sometimes frustrating events come to pass.

He was born on a mellow day in late May, a fragile, five-pound, 12-ounce bundle of ears, gangly legs, and cinnamon-red fur dappled with white. Even at birth, the little buck was exceptional. His mother had carried him and his twin sister 213 days, a week longer than the normal gestation for whitetail deer, and he weighed about half a pound more than the average whitetail buck fawn.

"I just can't understand how I could have missed that buck five straight times!" said the man we shall call Frank ( mainly because that isn't his name ). The rest of us around the campfire glanced at each other in puzzlement.

It was a December night, the kind that hunters know better than those who pass the winter inside a house, when the cold plucks and probes at every seam in a man's clothing. The five of us around the dying fire sat hushed, listening, wrapped in the splendor of the night sky. All our minds ran to the same theme: somewhere out there in the dark thickets there a great whitetail buck with Orion's light on his antler tips.

I hunt hard, goes the refrain, and I'm a good hunter. I see plenty of deer. I get my share. But somehow I never find a really big one. Just one real trophy is all I ask; we like the venison, but how I'd like to hang just one honest-to-gosh monster on the wall! But I just can't seem to get lucky.