I had to commend her attitude. With a clean arrow confirming her miss, we had no anguish over a wounded deer, and Lori was taking events like a trooper. But I had to debrief her about the deer.

“Big!” was her first response to my re-quest for a description.

“Come on, honey,” I replied. “You can do better than that.”

“He was just a 4x4,” she continued, closing her eyes like a witness trying to recall the details of an accident. “And he wasn’t very tall. But he was heavy and wide.”

“How wide?”

“Real wide!”

“Wider than that?” I asked, pointing to one of the better racks on the wall.

“Much wider,” she replied, placing her hands three inches beyond each of the mounted buck’s main beams. Lori is a keen observer, and I knew I’d never seen this deer before. Suddenly, we had a mission.

IN MONTANA, WE SHARE the whitetail rut with rifle hunters, and I have to admit that I winced a bit harder than usual every time I heard a gunshot on the neighboring property. Selfish? Perhaps. But I would have been delighted if someone else in our bowhunting circle killed that buck, especially Lori. And she made it plain that if I killed “her” deer, she’d be delighted, too.

By the last day of the season, I had yet to spot the buck she’d described. I wondered if he’d fallen to a bullet, or if Lori’s description had been fueled by excitement rather than objectivity. But I trusted her enough to take her story at face value, and when a small buck walked by me that final afternoon, I felt content to let him go and eat my buck tag. With a big buck somewhere in the woods, that’s what Mike would have done.

That’s the story of the Bentler Buck, as I decided to name him. Deer stories are supposed to end with the description of a successful blood trail and a hero picture, but it seemed appropriate to forgo all that last year. Somehow, not shooting a buck last season helped me balance the ledger, and I have no regrets.

And I finally saw him tonight, five days after the season’s close. I was driving back up the hill after an evening duck hunt when I saw a deer in the upper pasture silhouetted against the sunset. There he stood, just as Lori had described: four points on a side, heavy and wide. Real wide.

Knowing he’s still out there makes all the rest a bit easier, just as Mike would have wanted.