Armstrong sat back down in his seat and readied his gun. "I wouldn't look at the deer anymore," he said. "I just wanted to make sure I didn't bump any walls or rattle the window. I got the gun out the window, and from the time I saw the deer until I pulled the trigger, it was about a minute.

"He came up the middle of the field, toward the bait pile, and when he stopped and gave me the right angle, I shot."

The buck was about 65 yards away, in the middle of the one-acre food plot, when Armstrong dropped the hammer on him with a cherished gun, an old Savage Model 99 lever-action gun in .308 with a Tasco scope.

"I'm left-handed, and there aren't many guns out there for me," he said. "I bought this gun because I'm left-handed, after I was married in 1975. It was used then, but it suited me. It's got a narrow forearm, and it's like a brush gun. I wouldn't trade it for anything."

Armstrong's shot took the deer cleanly through the shoulders, and it ran back out of the field, dropping about 30 yards into the woods. Armstrong found him easily after waiting 45 minutes to get out of his stand. When he got to it, he was stunned at the size of the buck, which weighed 210 pounds on the hoof. The buck, judged by jawbone wear by a taxidermist at 5 1/2 years old, had an inside spread of 20 3/4 inches and back tines that measured 14 and 12 inches, plus a second set of tines that both measured 12 inches. The deer's rack was nearly perfectly symmetrical.

"We'll never know, but I wonder where he was living," Armstrong said. "I'd seen some sign -- some rubs and scrapes and some good tracks -- but I was thinking the big tracks belonged to the big cowhorn, which my brother killed. Its horns were 16 and 15 1/2 inches long."

Armstrong said that there were plenty of does working his food plot, a mixture of soybeans, Australian winter peas, oats, clover, kale and alfalfa. "We've seen as many as seven does in there at a time," he said. "Once the season got underway, we didn't do much messing around at the food plot; we knew the does were there. We were just hoping it would pay off."

Reuben Haynes' knowledge of the area he was hunting certainly paid off last Nov. 15, the second day of the blackpowder season in Stokes County. He was hunting a big wood lot that was bordered by a corn field.

"I saw the sign, the scrapes and everything; I took some time to scout it out," said Haynes, a 69-year-old who retired 15 years ago from Reynolds Tobacco Company. "I've been a hunter since I was a young guy. I like being in the woods."

Haynes found a great deer trail that wound its way through this patch of woods, which included a lot of oak trees. He was afraid that most of the deer using it were doing so at night, coming through the woods to the corn field. But that Monday morning, he drove his old Jeep back about 70 yards into the woods, parked it, climbed on top and sat down in a camouflage seat he has attached to the luggage rack -- putting him 6 or 7 feet off the ground.

"It's an old Jeep; I just drive it right in there, knocking down saplings and everything," he said. "There was a doe in that area. I saw her about an hour before him. She never did get close enough. I saw her off in the distance.

"An hour later, this buck came from the same direction and was browsing around in the woods. I had to watch him for two or three minutes. I was careful not to move until he got to where I thought he might stop, a clear area where I might get a shot at him.