Brandon Enevold began drawing up plans for this buck in March, and finished his design in November.

"So," I began, "how do you explain your absurd success on big whitetails? And if you were to move to a new town, could you replicate it?"

"Sure. First, what we do..." Brandon Enevold began, and for the next hour I listened and took notes. Two days later, I had a similar conversation with the other half of the "we" Brandon mentioned -- his brother Joel Enevold.

I suspect that when most hunters think of Washington, they conjure up images of tiny blacktails creeping through soggy, impossibly thick ferns and fir trees in a downpour. That picture is not entirely inaccurate, but it is incomplete. In the past 10 years, the Enevold brothers have tagged over a dozen record-book or near-book whitetail deer in Eastern Washington.

This is an impressive feat, accomplished, as you would expect, after a lifetime of effort and experience. The lifetimes involved in this case, however, are fairly short, as Brandon is just 30 and Joel only 25.

Brandon didn't start out to be a trophy hunter. He was successful with whitetails from the start, tagging a buck almost every year since his uncle got him started bowhunting at age 14. But that changed for him one December when he was in college. As always, Brandon had filled his tag with the first legal buck that came along. Then he saw a truly big buck!

Brandon and Joel have trained themselves to score bucks on the hoof quickly and accurately. Even though he wasn't as skilled then as now, Brandon is confident the nontypical that changed his world had antlers that would have measured more than 200 inches. The next year, as he passed on bucks bigger than he'd ever shot, he got skunked for the first time. His goals had forever changed, and he has never looked back.

Joel's first buck scored 1546⁄8 -- and he wasn't even old enough to drive to his hunting spot. Shooting a monster buck at 15 could jade a person, but Joel remains one of the most enthusiastic, focused bowhunters I've ever talked to.

Both men are electrical design engineers. The traits and skills that make them good at their jobs translate well when applied to deer hunting. Think about the old joke in which the optimist says the glass is half full, the pessimist says it's half empty, and the engineer, looking puzzled, says, "The glass is twice as big as necessary." Well, that very literal, objective-driven way of looking at the world is an important component to the Enevold way of finding big bucks.

"Engineering," Brandon explained, "teaches you to take a problem, define the desired outcome, and then break it down into its most basic elements. We treat our deer hunting exactly the same way. The objective in our case is to kill Pope & Young bucks every year."

Yeah, I thought. Mine too. Let's throw in a trophy bull elk and 100 chukars as long as we're fantasizing. But instead, I said, "Most deer hunters want a big buck every year, but usually don't even see one. What do you do differently?"

Brandon and Joel employ an aggravatingly simple, two-pronged strategy -- they hunt where big bucks live, and they hunt undisturbed deer.

Finding deer that adhere to their natural movement patterns requires some preseason legwork. It isn't easy and may result in some slammed doors as well as new friends, but it can be done. To find these hidden honey holes, Joel and Brandon smoke out small parcels of private ground. They secure permission to hunt overlooked patches of cover, some as small as five-acre home sites, as opposed to more traditional farm country. Deer in these precincts are rarely pressured during rifle season, due to the proximity of dwellings and livestock. The deer are also acclimated to people.