A few minutes later, Boston heard a commotion behind him, in the cutover. "It sounded like a freight train," he said. "I looked back and could see the buck back in the clearcut. He was just thrashing the weeds and trees back and forth with his horns. I think he was just trying to get out and it was so thick. I've never seen (a buck) take his horns and beat them like that. But he was coming out of there to get to that doe."

The buck made a beeline through the cutover toward the doe. He was headed straight for Boston, who was afraid that the buck would scent him, stop, whirl and leave. "The wind was cutting from the doe to the buck, and I was right on the edge of it," he said. "I knew he was smelling her, and I was afraid he was going to smell me, but he was still coming to me, at a fast trot, with his head down. I was just praying he wouldn't smell me."

Boston didn't really want to take the buck head on with a muzzleloader.

"I didn't want to shoot him from the front, and he was coming face to face to me the whole time. Plus, I hadn't cut a lot of stuff out behind me," he said.

But when the buck was 20 yards from his stand, Boston realized that he was high enough in the tree to have a good killing shot. He took aim at the spot where the buck's neck and spine met and let fly.

"He just fell, fell right down," Boston said. "The doe ran away, but you know, a little while later, she came back with another buck chasing her."

By that time, however, Boston was interested only in the huge buck on the ground in front of him. The 240-grain, .50-caliber Hornaday slug, fired from a Knight Disc rifle, had taken the buck just to the side of the spine, ranged down through its vitals, pancaking the buck on the spot.

And what a buck he was. He carried a 5x5 typical rack that was 21 inches wide. His rack was tall, heavy and ridiculously symmetrical. At the Dixie Deer Classic, scorers put the tape on him; his gross score was 156, and it netted 153 2/8, with only 2 6/8 inches in deductions.

The body was just as impressive. "I'm 6-foot-7 and 225 pounds, and I knew the deer weighed more than I do," Boston said. "I gutted him, dragged him out, and when I got to my truck, I couldn't get him up in it.

"I finally tied all four of his legs together, then I got down and put my arms under him and just kind of scooped him up, stood up and fell forward with him onto the tailgate."

Then, after some further examination, Boston realized that his buck wasn't likely a grown-up version of the one whose shed his father had found. First of all, the main beam on the shed curved well back in front of where the buck's nose would have been, giving the deer almost no space between the tips of his antlers. And the third point on the beam of the shed curved inward.

Those characteristics are not shared by Boston's trophy buck. His long, heavy beams curve inward only slightly at the tips. The tines stick up mostly straight. The only thing it shares with the shed is that its third tine on each beam is longer than its second.

"The one I killed looks nothing like the shed," he said. "The shed looks like one buck I killed there a couple of years before, but not like this one."

There's no way that Michael Clifton could have imagined that the buck of his dreams wound up looking the way it did on the second Saturday of gun season in Rockingham County.

"Over the years, I've killed some nice deer that day; it's always the same day as the Reidsville Christmas Parade," said Clifton, a 26-year-old employee of Dow-Corning in Greensboro who makes sure he has enough vacation to hunt at what he believes to be the peak of the rut.

"I was hunting a small farm I hadn't hunted in a few years. It's a small tract of land. I had hunted it a few times last season; I try to hunt it by the wind," Clifton said. "I've got a couple of friends, and we plan for hunting season; we scout year 'round and stay abreast of what's going on where we hunt."

At one location, Clifton felt sure he had a big buck working along the edge of a field of orchard grass. There were two main trails, one along the edge of the field, running parallel, and one about 50 yards back in the woods that Clifton felt sure was used only by bucks.

A buck had broken the branches off trees, especially pines, along the edge of the field. The branches, Clifton said, were as far off the ground as ribcage high. "I knew a 1 1/2- or 2 1/2-year-old (buck) didn't do that."

Clifton affixed a portable Climax stand to a red oak about 40 yards off the edge of the field, where he could look out of the woods into the field. He had two good openings where he could get clean shots at any deer strolling along the edge of the woods, out in the field.

"I had been seeing a few decent deer in there," Clifton said. "I passed up one nice 8-pointer, about 16 inches (wide), and there was another 16-inch deer, a 4-pointer. I was seeing them fairly regularly. And there were some huge rubs along the edge of the field; he was breaking off some huge pine limbs.

"Plus, it was a pretty good funnel. The does were coming in there, and there was a pretty good acorn crop. They were coming through there, feeding on the acorns, working their way to the orchard grass in the field.

"I had a 3-pointer running a doe in there -- I hadn't been in my stand 10 or 15 minutes that afternoon," he said. "Then, the big 4-pointer came in with his nose on the ground. I could tell the rut was wide open."

The woods quieted down for a while, then Clifton heard some limbs breaking behind him. He turned and saw the same 4-pointer; this time, the buck eased to the edge of the field, lifted his nose and scent-checked the field, then headed back into the woods.