"Gosh, he's got thick antlers and a lot of points" was Jeff Hughes' first thought when he saw this buck, whose rack is probably unscorable, come through the trees. Photo by Dan Kibler

Jeff Hughes of Wallburg is a serious deer hunter. He has spent thousands of dollars traveling across North America in search of a once-in-a-lifetime trophy buck.

He went looking last fall in Alberta, spending a week there, waiting for that enormous 10- or 12-pointer to step out in front of his stand.

He never pulled the trigger or even took the safety off his 7mm Magnum in seven days in the wild woods of the Canadian plains. Hughes jetted home last Nov. 14. Two days later, he found that trophy buck, an hour from home in Rockingham County.

Of course, the buck isn't a trophy in the typical sense of the word. It isn't the 20-inch 10-pointer with 14-inch back tines that haunts the dreams of every deer hunter. It's not even a big non-typical with split brow tines and drop tines on each heavily palmated main beam.

But it's the kind of trophy that Hughes figures is better than one of those one-in-a-million Boone and Crockett racks, because it is even more rare.

What Hughes killed on his lease in the southwestern corner of Rockingham County last Nov. 16 was what the deer-hunting world refers to as a "cactus buck."

How best to describe it? Just imagine huge antler bases, but instead of beams growing out of them, how about multiple long and short points that grow in every direction, like the spines on a cactus?

"I e-mailed a picture of it to a friend of mine, Keith Belford, who works for Boone and Crockett, and he said he'd have never believed it," Hughes said. "He showed it to some people out there (at B&C headquarters in Montana), and a lot of them said it looked like it was unscoreable."

Taxidermist Vincent Fleming of Yadkinville, who was on the Alberta trip last November with Hughes, said he's never seen anything like it in 20 years; he said he can't believe that a Boone and Crockett scorer could ever put a tape measure to the rack and come up with any kind of score. He considers it unscoreable, but is going to let an official scorer take a look at the buck to see if he's on the beam -- so to speak.

"It's not gonna be a rack that scores 170 or 180 or 190, but you've never seen anything like it. It's an old deer; it has a thick skull and the head and shoulders of a 170- or 180-pound deer, but the neck of a bow season deer," Fleming said. "I'd say by the jawbone that it was 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 years old.

"We had just come back from Canada, eight of us, and he kills this buck at home."

What does the buck look like? Hughes has put a tape measure to it -- several times. He gets different numbers every time he tries to make sense of it in terms of points and inches, but he's fairly sure that it has 20 points that are scoreable -- at least 1 inch long. The right antler has bases that are 8 inches in circumference and 13 points, with the two longest ones jutting out in different directions measuring 14 and 11 inches, plus another 8-inch tine. The left antler has another 8-inch base, one tine that measures 15 1/2 inches and another that goes 8 1/2.

The 20 points measure a total of 120 inches. Add in the circumference of both bases and you have 136 inches of antler -- with no spread credits or any other circumference measurements, because how are you going to figure spread or circumference if you can't figure out which tines are the main beams?

Fleming said that if he were forced to find a way to score the deer, he'd pick out the two longest tines and call them the main beams, then call 8- and 7 1/2-inch points that jut from their bases the brow tines. Both of the longest tines fork near the end, so Fleming said that he'd call it a 6-point buck with a 7 1/4-inch inside spread, putting the non-typical score conservatively in the low 150s.

Of course, Fleming doesn't think it can be scored at all.