If you tried to call someone in Columbus, Ohio, between 7:00 and 8 p.m. on Oct. 18, 2011, and got an "all circuits are busy" message, blame Ronnie Stevens.

By the time he'd finished calling all his friends that evening, his telephone was smoking; there was no skin left on his dialing thumb; and he was perilously close to having laryngitis. It's a wonder he didn't lose track of who knew and who didn't know that he'd let the air out of a world-class whitetail.

"I called pretty much everyone in Ohio," he grins.

The bowhunter made short work of putting an arrow through his heart's desire during his first stint in a new stand, although the 25 days leading up to that long anticipated encounter were anything but routine.

On the way back home from his son's volleyball game on opening day of bow season, he spotted a bachelor group of very nice bucks feeding in a bean field. One was an incredible 10-pointer he thought would easily tally 180 inches.

So smitten with the deer, Ronnie found out who owned the property and gained permission to hunt it, which would've been okay except that the nearby village had a "no projectile" ordinance (as applicable to broadheads as it is bullets).

After trying and failing to persuade city officials to allow him to hunt that farm, he wound up having to seeking permission to hunt another landowner's property -- outside the village's jurisdiction -- across the road.
 

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The owner of an auto body shop in Baxter Springs, Kan., unwittingly discovered the truth behind crop circles last month, much to the chagrin of believers in UFOs and extraterrestrials.

Jay Price witnessed the phenomenon in a Cherokee County soybean field on Oct. 3, and the experience left him weak-kneed and unable to perform even the simplest of tasks.

The culprit was a deer, specifically a very large buck with a very large hole in it.

"As soon as the arrow hit, that deer started doing somersaults," the 32-year-old businessman claims. "It ran between 60 and 80 yards out into the beans and just started rolling around, really tearing them up, like somebody on a four-wheeler was cutting doughnuts."

As soon as the giant whitetail ran out of gas, it sank out of sight into the beans, which is when Jay thought he'd messed up and shot the "wrong" deer. He hadn't taken the time to really study the rack before the shot, and there was no time to ogle it afterward.

Wrong, in this case, meant the smaller of two shooter bucks he'd seen a couple of days earlier while scouting with a buddy.

His fears, however, were unwarranted. With a composite score of 228 3/8 (210 without the spread) the 22-pointer is No. 19 among Sunflower State Irregulars felled by compound bow.

I'll share the rest of the story in Rack magazine next summer.

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I've heard far more hokey than cool nicknames bestowed upon whitetails. I've even seen fellow bloggers altogether denounce the practice, which has grown more popular because every Tom, Dick and Harriet among TV show hosts thinks viewers love it.

But this is a debate for another time.

Meanwhile, I'll judge them as I hear them. And my hands-down favorite came across my desk this year, referencing a humongous Kansas buck taken by Lucas Cochren in Jackson County. The name is Bankrupt, and Mrs. Cochren, the hunter's wife, gets the gold star.

Her reasoning is that her beloved and his three buddies had collected thousands of trail camera photographs of this buck for three years. Prior to 2011, when Lucas finally decided the deer was big enough, Bankrupt always managed to bust up his rack while fighting.

"He was always broke," she explains.

Is that a perfect name, or what?

Last season, Bankrupt either lost the urge to fight, or other bucks simply gave him a wide berth. After all, squaring off against this 5-year-old would've been akin to bringing a chopstick to a sword fight.

Lucas hunts his family's 1,000-acre farm and an adjoining spread. He and his pals don't consider a buck fair game unless it's 5 years old. At age 3, Bankrupt wore an estimated 180 inches of antler; even more in 2010. But his fifth and final rack was substantially bigger.

He missed a 320-yard poke at the drop-tined Bankrupt on the first Friday of rifle season. A week later, he saw the buck feeding out in a cornfield and didn't.

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A wide-eyed Shane Ragon clapped a hand to his open mouth like he was trying to swallow a cuss word in the presence of a preacher.

The 40-year-old bowhunter from Calhoun City, Miss., didn't know whether to laugh or cry, to shout hallelujah or utter something less suitable for a tent revival. What he did know was that every time he tried to walk away from the buck lying dead in the sweet potato field, he turned right around and went back to it.

"I just couldn't leave that deer," Shane said. "I'd let go of those antlers and walk off, but then I'd go back. I did that at least three times.

"My hand was shaking so badly, the flashlight's beam was dancing around like a strobe light," he added.

Shane knew that the buck behind his bow sight's pin was bigger than any other he'd shot, but he hadn't exactly paid that much attention to the rack. He was too busy trying to hide behind a power pole and praying the animal would come within range.

It did, too, and became the year's first 200-incher from Mississippi (and, surprisingly, NOT from the Delta). His 9-year-old son, Zane, calls it "the biggest thing in the world."

The full story of Shane's Oct. 6 impromptu bowhunt will appear in Rack magazine next summer, and it's a good one.

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