By Dan Kibler

Since the day he graduated from high school in 1991, Randy Warren of Rougemont had always been his own boss. A trim carpenter by trade, he could arrange his work schedule to leave room for his favorite activities - like deer hunting, for example.

"Usually, I didn't miss a day of bow season or muzzleloader or the first week of gun season," said Warren, 31, grinning.

But when business slowed down early in 2002, Warren had to take a regular 40-hour-a-week job for a contracting firm. Somehow, it didn't really affect his hunting. In fact, he had the best year of his life.

"When I started my new job, I didn't get to hunt as much. I wasn't able to hunt except afternoons and weekends, but it seemed like every time I stepped in the woods, it happened," Warren said.

He took a typical 9-point buck with split brow tines during archery season. He took another 9-pointer early in gun season, then a 15-pointer with a 4x5 typical frame and sticker points all over the brow tines. All were trophy bucks in their own right, but nothing compared to the Orange County deer that filled out his last buck tag.

Although Randy Warren's buck clearly shows an impressive typical frame, it is also North Carolina's largest known non-typical from the 2002 season. Photo by Dan Kibler

When Warren finally got a day off during the week to hunt, things really turned in his favor. He took a monster 10-pointer, plus a handful of sticker points, that scored as the largest non-typical deer taken in North Carolina in 2002. That's the category that Warren's buck won at the Dixie Deer Classic in Raleigh last February.

"Really, there was a lot of luck," Warren said. "The Monday after the first big ice storm we had, the boss had gone out of town, and I hadn't heard from him, didn't know whether we were working or not, so I decided to hunt a box blind for a little while that morning until I heard from him.

"I took my phone with me; it was just a box blind, over a clover field next to a cutover, and it was an easy place to hunt, an easy access hunt. I didn't know how long I could stay, so I went to that place."

Just 15 minutes or so from his house, the 4x9 box blind is situated on a small farm belonging to a relative. The entire chunk of land probably doesn't cover much more than 50 acres. The cutover was the perfect age to be a deer "sanctuary" - three years - and Warren had disked and harrowed and planted the half-acre clover patch two years earlier.

It wasn't one of Warren's best stands; he'd never killed a deer there before, but other hunters had, and there was some promising buck sign.

"The clover patch is about a half-acre," Warren said. "It's got cutover on two sides of it and railroad tracks on the other. The guy I hunt with, he's killed a couple of nice deer in there and has seen a couple more good ones. He had a portable sawmill, and we cut the timber and built this box, put it up on 8x8s, eight feet off the ground.

"We have two boxes and some tripods, but most of them are over corn. This was the only clover field we had. My buddy and a few other people hunt it a whole lot more than I do. In fact, he took his girlfriend there and let her shoot one and got it on video and all. It's a comfortable stand."

But easy access was the factor that sent Warren to the box blind on the morning of Dec. 9, 2002. He climbed in before daylight and spent an uneventful hour there, when his luck suddenly changed.

"I had been sitting there about an hour, hadn't seen anything, and I just happened to look up, and there he stood," Warren said.

A big buck had entered the clover field from the cutover and was standing broadside, about 90 yards away, a few steps out of the cover. It didn't take Warren but a second to realize this one was a really good buck. He shouldered his .257 magnum, took a look through the 3x9 scope, and decided to fill his last buck tag.

"I looked at him just a second and took the shot, and he took off," Warren said. "He'd come out of the cutover, and he went back into it.

"I felt like I'd made a good shot because I didn't have enough time to really get nervous, but I was shooting a 115-grain ballistic tip (bullet), and it zips on through 'em. Unless it hits a bone or goes in the shoulder real good, they'll usually run a good ways."

And the thought of tracking a buck that big by himself gave Warren a cold chill. Warren is colorblind, and blood-trailing a deer isn't the easiest task he faces. He'd much rather have to install a five-piece crown molding in a 6,000-square-foot mansion than rely on his eyesight to pick up every little drip or drop of red on the trail.

"I called my buddy in Durham, Barry Klinepeter, to help track the deer," Warren said. "We went back and tracked him close to 100 yards, and all of the sudden, there he laid. When I walked up to him, I just stood there in amazement. My buddy was even more amazed. He said, 'Randy, do you know what you've got here?' And I said, 'No, just a super nice deer.'

"I knew it was the biggest I'd killed in my life, but I didn't know it would score like it did."

The wide, heavy rack the buck carried indeed scored through the roof. Dave Boland of Chatfield, Minnesota, an official scorer for the Boone and Crockett Club, put his tape on the buck at the Dixie Deer Classic and gave it scores of 160 1/8 net typical and 172 2/8 net non-typical. Warren chose to take the non-typical score, and it was enough to win him the award for the biggest non-typical of 2002.

The buck had an inside spread of 19 7/8 inches and main beams that measured 26 7/8 and 26 5/8 inches. The shorter of the two brow tines was a shade less than 5 inches, the other, a shade under 6 inches. The biggest tines ranged from 9 4/8 to 11 1/8 inches, and it was uniformly heavy, with the circumferences at the base of both antlers measuring 4 7/8 inches, out to better than 3 1/2 inches near the tips.

The buck had five sticker points. The largest was a 5 1/2-inch sticker where the first tall tine on the left beam forked, giving the buck a mule deer look. Four other sticker points - two on each beam - protruded from the brow tines and the bases, and they measured between 1 4/8 and 2 2/8 inches long.

The buck had a total of 12 1/8 inches of non-typical points and only 6 inches of deductions for symmetry between the two beams.

The non-typical points weren't the only things about the buck that were peculiar. For one, his body didn't match his horns. Warren estimated that the buck weighed between 160 and 170 pounds, on the hoof. An examination of the buck's lower jawbone revealed that the buck was 6 1/2 years old.

"For the horns, it was a small deer. He was real thin, like he'd already rutted out," Warren said.

And more interesting, he carried a very fresh, noticeable scar on one of his flanks. "He had a place about halfway down his back where he'd been stuck," Warren said. "Something stuck him on one side. When I cleaned him out, he was bruised for about 10 inches on both sides of his spine, and it wasn't a bullet or an arrow."

Warren can't imagine that there was another buck around big enough to leave a 10-inch-long puncture wound in the buck, so he surmised that the buck was, in fact, a victim of the vicious ice storm that crossed North Carolina the first weekend of December 2002, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without electrical power for four or five days.

The only thing Warren could figure was that the big buck had been hit and punctured by a limb from a falling tree. And it added to his feeling that killing the buck was a matter of timing and luck.

"Hey, there was a lot of luck," Warren admitted. "The ice storm had a lot to do with me even seeing him - because we didn't work that day."

How will Warren's luck run this season? Well, business has picked up, and he's back to being his own boss again, trimming out houses and setting his own hours. Now, if the next ice storm will just show up at the right time. . . .