If you aim your personal holidays and, perhaps, a week’s worth of vacation straight at November, you know that stories about big bucks usually aren’t told until a hunter claims the attendant bragging rights. For example, Bill never breathed a word about the “ol’ baster” that was staving up stumps out behind the cemetery. Likewise, Dan didn’t even tell his wife about the tracks denting the old railroad bed – splayed two inches at the tips, they were, and driven clear to the dew claws.

No siree, bub, the parish priest couldn’t have gotten a confession out of either of them as to the whereabouts of the bucks they had their sights set on. But you can bet that as soon as those deer were wearing identification tags, word of their demise spread faster than small-town gossip. And you can bet your hunting license that those stories – told, of course, in great detail embellished with animation – expressed respect and admiration for the wariness and cleverness displayed by the elusive animals.

A classic example is the story Jim Bunce of East Corinth told me about the buck he tagged last fall: “I knew he’d staked out a piece of woods behind the Higgins farm as his territory,” said the 57-year-old sportsman who, after open-heart surgery and 10 artery bypass operations, still takes to the woods come fall. “In the past few years, I’d cut his trail a number of times but couldn’t get a decent poke at him. As big as he was, and lugging that rack of his, he was still just like a ghost. I’d see him and he’d be gone, just like that. He knew right where he was and where I was all the time and he knew the way to the backdoor when he needed it.”

Because of medical problems, Jim no longer can thrash around in swamps and thickets or climb ridges in the course of a day’s hunting. Accordingly, he said the piece of woods occupied by the buck offered “an easy chance to hunt.” He described the area as a cutting overgrown with hardwoods, briars, scattered green growth, and a field on one side.

“A couple of times,” the veteran hunter admitted, “that buck gave me the slip by ducking into a clump of cedars on the edge of the woods and escaping across the field, or so I thought. And I’d probably still be thinking that if I hadn’t gotten lucky. I say `lucky’ because it was early in November, the 9th to be exact, and it was so warm you could sweat just by thinking about hunting. The bucks hadn’t started rutting, so I can’t say he got careless on account of his nose being stuffed with doe scent.

“It was pushing daylight when my hunting partner Arnie Lyons and I headed for the Higgins farm. When we left, I said to my girlfriend, Donna Seymour, `I’m going to get him this morning.’ Her answer was, `Oh, sure. It seems I’ve heard that before.”‘

By 7 o’clock, brilliant sunlight spilled from a sky as blue as a robin’s egg. From Jim’s account, I can imagine him hunting through a patch of briars that would put a barbed wire fence to shame. “Arnie was hunting near a tote road when I jumped the buck,” he said. “Man, he was only hitting the high spots. I fired four slugs at him from my 12-gauge, semi-automatic Franchi and he never broke stride. Arnie took to the tote road, and I went looking for signs that the deer was hit but found nothing.”

Understandably, Jim was beginning to think he’d been jinxed. But in the next heart beat, the sound – or was it a motion? – that caught his attention turned out to be the buck coming back toward him. “He was still in high gear when I poked two more slugs at him and saw him go down. I’ll be damned, though, if he didn’t get back onto his feet and go charging through the briars like a horse headed for the barn. You know where he went? Straight for that same clump of cedars near the edge of the woods – and when he went into them I never saw him again.”

The disgruntled hunter figured the buck again had used the hedge-thick growth as an escape route. To his surprise, however, he found the deer lying smack in the middle of the cedars “in a bed that you’d have to see to believe.” One of the trees had bent and grown almost horizontal to the ground, forming a canopy over the bed. Small wonder the buck never showed after ducking in there; his mother couldn’t have found him. The bed was, in fact, a haven, hideout, alleyway, and backdoor that allowed the buck to win more than a few games of hunting season hide-and-seek.

“It all happened so quick,” said Jim. “In a matter of seconds, his luck ran out and I got lucky; it’s as simple as that. We drove the truck to within a few feet of him, loaded him on, and were back home by 9 o’clock. Donna couldn’t believe it when I called her at work and told her.”

Field dressed, the buck weighed 216 pounds. That’s not god-awful big as Maine bucks go, but you can believe his eight-point antlers would bring tears to any deer hunter’s eyes. They measured 22 inches at the tips and a level wouldn’t have aligned all the points more perfectly. Sprouting from beams thicker than axe handles, the brow tines measured 10 inches, the beam tines, 12 inches. It’s possible that Jim Bunce may have bagged a Maine-record rack. And when the numbers game is over, his once-in-a-lifetime trophy may be registered in the Boone and Crockett Club.

All well and good. Now, you know, of course, that when a trout is taken from a particular pool, another trout will take over that tenancy in short order. Likewise, when a bird, let’s say a partridge, is bagged in a certain corner of a cover, it usually isn’t long before another bird moves in. Therefore, if I were Jim Bunce, I’d keep my eye on that buck’s vacant and well-made bed.