"If he stepped out where the two does did, I'd have an easy 20-yard poke at him. I had my bow ready and was about to come to full draw when I noticed another doe squirt out of the pines into the beans on the same trail the first doe had used. This one showed signs of being in heat. I felt certain the buck would step out now, right behind her."

Tom Schneider's homemade ground blind sits tight against some almost impenetrable pines that allow him to prevent deer from winding him when there's a southeast wind.

What Tom didn't know was that the buck was shadowing the doe downwind of her, not behind her, which brought him out of the pines closer to the blind. Tom caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and when he slowly turned to look, his eyes met a buck that was clearly the largest he'd ever seen and definitely not the buck he'd grunted at earlier.

"He was staring right at me at six yards," Tom recalled. "I think the deer saw my tonsils when my jaw dropped open in awe. But if there's one thing I've learned about ground-blind hunting, it's that deer often will calm down if you don't make any sudden movements. We stared at each other for about 10 seconds before the buck finally put his head down and started walking. With no time for buck fever to take over, I went on autopilot."

The does had scampered away when they saw the buck coming, and Tom couldn't believe how easy this was going to be.

"I had to resist the urge to draw on him right away when he looked down," Tom said.

"You just can't get away with that in a ground blind. I've found that the best way to draw on deer from a ground blind is to draw at about the same pace as the deer is walking. It's kind of like when you are walking down the street and a person off to your side is moving slowly, you don't really notice him. But if the person jumps up and down you'll catch that movement every time."

As the buck passed behind one of the corner posts of the ground blind, Tom slowly drew.

"The buck didn't notice me," he said. "I was at full draw on the biggest deer I'd ever seen and decided to quickly scan around me to make sure that my limbs were clear of the blind and that my bowstring wouldn't hit anything when I released. But I'd just completed the quick double-check and got my eye back in the peep when the buck suddenly trotted off in the direction of the apparently hot doe."

Nearly in shock, Tom watched as the buck headed straight away.

"I wanted to scream," Tom said, "but I let out a loud bawl instead, challenging the buck."

"In my 35 years of hunting, I have only heard that noise three times," Tom confided. "It isn't a wheeze or grunt. If you've ever heard a farmer grab a calf by the tail and drag it back into a pen, you've heard the sound I made. When I did that, the buck stopped and did a 90-degree turn at about 28 yards to see the pipsqueak who was challenging him.

Twenty-eight yards is a long shot for me, but it was all instinct. I let the arrow go and watched my Lumenok arc right into what I thought was his heart. He bolted and made his way into some thick brush and I lost him. I stuck my head out of the blind and listened for him to fall."