"Ten or 15 minutes later, I saw one doe come out; she worked her way down to the edge of the orchard grass," Clifton said. "She was eating along -- one time she raised her head and she had a piece of orchard grass at least 2 feet long hanging out of her mouth. Then all of the sudden, she looked back over her shoulder -- the way she'd come from. I sat and watched her for five minutes; I knew she had some more deer with her. Then she moved on."

About five minutes later, Clifton saw movement along the edge of the field and was able to recognize the silhouette of a big deer. "I knew right away he was bigger than the two bucks I'd seen," Clifton said. "He came out of the pines to the edge of the orchard grass, and I said, 'Oh Lord, what a deer.' He was a big non-typical; you could see all the stuff on his head.

"There were two places I could shoot along the edge of the field, and he got past the first place. He was about five minutes behind the doe; he could probably see her from where he was.

"I got my rifle up as he worked his way down the edge of the field. He was probably 50 yards away. I had the one opening left, and when he got to it, I grunted with my mouth, and that stopped him. I already had the cross hairs on his shoulder, so I shot, and he bucked up and ran off."

Clifton said he wasn't nervous at first -- only when he sat in his stand for a few minutes and thought about it did he start to feel jelly-legged.

"I said, 'Lord, you've got to get me down out of this tree,' " Clifton said.

Calmed enough to climb down, he made his way to the edge of the field, where he searched fruitlessly for sign of a hit. "I didn't find any blood at first, but then I backtracked and came across a spot," said Clifton, who was shooting a Kimber .30/06 with a 165-grain Hornaday bullet. "I trailed him across a little hedgerow, and there was this little draw that ran through the field. When I got there, I could see the white part of his backside -- then I saw that rack."

What a rack!

The buck's antlers look like they've been injected with a plastic explosive, then had the charge set off, with sticker points going in every direction from both beams. The left beam has 10 points, nine of them scoreable, and the left beam has 11 points, 10 of them scoreable -- and a drop tine on each beam was broken off at the base of each point.

The rack is 17 inches wide inside. The right beam has two drop tines and four other sticker points. The left has a single drop tine and a sticker point that splits into a perfect fork. The buck grossed 174 inches and netted 167 5/8, with more than 27 inches of sticker points.

"I knew there was a good deer in there, but I didn't expect to see something like him," Clifton said. "All the years I've hunted, I've never seen a non-typical like that. But the guy who owns the property said, 'I hope you killed the big one that's around here.' Then he saw him and he said, 'Mike, that's not the big one.' He'd seen a bigger deer one night after dark when he was coming in."

So typical or not, Clifton has something to look forward to this fall.