Every hunter has his favorite game animals. The pronghorn antelope of the western prairies is not mine. He can't hold a candle to a whitetail buck for IQ, and his is one of the very few North American wild meats that I don't like.

If a whitetail buck has grown to maturity in a hunted pasture, I think he deserves the title of "trophy" regardless of the size of his antlers.

Watch small whitetail twin fawns at play and you’ll likely observe that one is not only slightly larger but that he (it will invariably be a “he”) is also bolder and more alert, more aggressive in nursing and quicker to sample unknown foods. He’ll seem spookier and more curious, and will venture farther from his mother’s side.

Since trophy hunters seem to be in low esteem among uninformed non-hunters, I cannot so identify myself without a word of explanation. First, true trophy-deer hunters are highly selective, discriminating and skilled hunters who kill very seldom and who help keep the age and sex ratios in a whitetail population as much like an unhunted herd as possible.

Many are the changes in deer hunting that I’ve seen in my 60 years of chasing whitetails.

Everybody dreams of bigger-antlered bucks on his ranch or lease. We know there are three essential elements in the big-antler equation – age, nutrition, and genetics. All are important ... but they are not equally important.

The first vocal sound I ever heard from a whitetail deer nearly ended my deer-hunting career before it was fairly begun, and thus almost drove me to take up honest work! It came from the throat of my first whitetail buck. I was a tender 13, hunting all alone, and the eight-pointer was very close. This was good; otherwise, I'd never have hit him, given the violent case of buck fever that shook me like a seismograph needle in a high-Richter earthquake. When I was finally able to make the rifle fire, the buck went down in a heap, spine-shot... and he bawled! It was a shocking, harsh, dragged-out sound, more like a yearling than a deer, and it horrified me. I could never stand making an animal suffer, and the bawl triggered a wave of remorse and guilt–until I realized that the buck couldn't be suffering, having given up the ghost at about the moment his bawl ended.

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.

I know how it feels to be the target of automatic weapons fire in infantry combat. I have seen the eyes of a drunken man, armed with a machete, bent on taking my life. I've looked wounded Cape buffalo bull in the teeth at just 15 yards. I've endured the stunning silence after a light airplane's one engine quit without warning. I once had the reserve air valve of a scuba tank jam and leave me literally breathless 85 feet below the surface of the Caribbean. Altogether, I can recall a lot of times when the seconds seemed to drag by like a convict's weeks... but _the _longest ten minutes I've ever lived through were in a blind in an African dusk, listening to a leopard feeding just 45 steps away!