The never-before-seen buck might’ve been shadowing the big doe that reached the food plot moments earlier.

Or it might’ve just been hungry.

Regardless of what lured it into the open at dusk on Jan. 3, the clover was its last meal.

Before Kenneth Bordelon climbed into his favorite ladder stand in Avoyelles Parish that Monday, he’d never shot a buck bigger than a 14-inch-wide 8-pointer. By the time he got down from his perch a couple of hours later, he’d twice hammered not only the biggest whitetail ever seen in that parish, but also the seventh-largest in all of Louisiana (among rifle-taken Irregulars).

So shocked at having even seen such a buck on the hoof, the hunter from Vick, La., doesn’t remember his boots touching a single rung on his way down the ladder. For all he knows, he floated the 300 yards to the 25-pointer lying dead in his food plot.

“I was going to wait about 10 or 15 minutes before going to it, but I couldn’t,” he admitted. Equally impatient were his father and a cousin, who were also hunting that afternoon and heard both shots. They were punching Ken’s number into their cell phones before he even had a chance to count the gnarly rack’s points.

“They wanted to know what I’d shot,” Ken said. “At first, I called it a 12- or 14-pointer … until I finally counted everything that could be considered a point.”

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Only once have I seen more than three bucks hot on the trail of the same doe, and I mean kissing-each-other’s-hooves close.

I was bowhunting a tract in Mississippi that had been intensely managed for 20 years or more, when eight deer – seven bucks and one completely tuckered doe – filed past my stand.

To have a buck-to-doe ratio like that, you’d think any piece of ground would have to be managed to the hilt. And even then, you’d probably have to throw a high fence around it in order to keep your neighbors’ does off your land and your own immature bucks from leaving.

Daniel “DJ” Elder might be hard to convince. He doesn’t sound like a candidate for a high-fence hunt, and he’s probably not in the market for chain-link.

The hunter from Whitehall, Ohio, was hunting public ground in Perry County last October when a hot doe led a train of 14 bucks across the ridge he and his 13-year-old daughter, Savanna, were watching. The first 13 were beyond his crossbow’s range, but the very last and biggest one felt the bite of a broadhead.

DJ’s buck measures 172 6/8 inches as a Typical. A nearly 19-inch spread gives the rack a composite score of 191 5/8.

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As far as Dave Ediger is concerned, cams are for football teams and car engines; peeps are sounds made by tiny chickens; and fiber optics are nothing more than 30-pound-test monofilament, better suited for deep-sea fishing than weed-eating. The veteran hunter from Buhler, Kan., is among the few left who prefer to hunt deer with a plain-Jane bow, a recurve he just points and shoots, which launches cedar arrows fletched with feathers. Speed doesn’t matter, when dead is dead. And dead is one tremendous Harvey County whitetail that not only is a new state record, but also a runner-up to the world-record Typical in the BTR’s recurve category. Dave put one of his cedar arrows through it last November. He was hunting land that has been in the family for more than a century, sitting in a stand his son, Caley, had hung so long ago that the host pine had begun swallowing it. It wasn’t his first choice of ground or setup, but he didn’t have another place situated for the north wind that assaulted south-central Kansas that afternoon. Just over an hour into his Nov. 13 vigil, Dave was dialing his son’s number.

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If dancing the Macarena would give me a second chance at a departing buck, I’d grab my hips and swish for all I’m worth. And if you’re a bowhunter, you know exactly how I feel.

Nothing is more frustrating than watching an enormous buck walk out of your life, ignoring your most provocative urrps, wahhs and even the clash of rattlin’ horns, be they real or synthetic. If a shooter is beyond bow range, especially if it’s getting farther away, most bowhunters will throw everything they’ve got at him.

Ron Poole did the Hail-Mary thing last Nov. 19 in Iowa. Realizing he wasn’t going to pull the monstrous 22-pointer off a hot doe by grunting or hoping, he dug out a snort-wheeze call and invited Romeo to a butt-kicking, and it worked like a charm.

While a lot of bucks will do anything to avoid sharing real estate with a huff-and-puffer, the bullies often come running. Ron’s deer was of the latter group, which is why it’s now hanging on his wall in Hector, Ark.

Ron uses a compound bow, but he’s an instinctive shooter who prefers fingers over a release. Although he had a hard time not looking at antlers, he drilled the buck at 35 yards. It wound up being Iowa’s largest bow-killed Irregular in 2010, No. 6 for its category there.

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