I've got a few bucks that haunt me but two stand out. One was the tallest mule deer rack I've ever seen or seen pictures of, with low forks and extremely long tines. He wasn't wide as mulies go and the extreme height looked odd when he turned toward me, but he would score well into the book. I watched him at a range of 100 yards for ten minutes, with a deer tag in my pocket and deer season open, but I was on a hike with some yuppies and hadn't carried my rifle along in case it might offend them.
The other was a true blacktail on the Olympic Peninsula in mid-November. I was on a cliff top in old growth timber watching a big ugly racked fork horn nuzzle a doe below me, when I noticed a deer 25 yards to one side of them, mostly hidden in brush. A huge dark mass of sticks stuck up above the brush and looked like antlers but it was too big to be a blacktail rack, more the size of a mule deer, plus I figured that if it was a buck it would be sniffing the doe. I watched it a moment then turned my attention back to the fork horn, trying to decide whether to shoot him, when the huge rack moved and disappeared. I glimpsed the buck twice more but never got a shot at him. That was years ago, before I started carrying binoculars when still hunting woods.
