The husky 10-pointer stepped soundlessly from a tangle of briars on the hardwood ridge. "Whoa!" I marveled. "Where did you come from?" There had been no rustle or flicker of gray in the autumn woods. The big deer simply materialized like one of those ghost bucks that haunt all deer hunters' dreams.

But I wasn't dreaming. On this particular early November morning I was, in fact, back "home" amid the forested hills of southern Indiana where I'd launched my bowhunting career in the early 1960s.

Reaching for my bow was out of the question, so I moved only admiring eyes as the alert buck crossed an old logging trail and paused maybe 30 yards beyond the gnarly oak containing my portable stand. Posing, he swiveled his rut-thickened neck as if to better display his handsome headgear. I drank in the buck's every move. My first glimpse had convinced me that if I could somehow manage a good shot, I'd take it. This was a classic no-brainer.

But when the buck finally turned and ambled toward a timbered bench, I fretted that he was walking out of my life forever. So I slowly reached for the deer call dangling across the front of my camo jacket. And just before he disappeared over the ridgeline 60-plus yards away, I gave a single loud grunt. The big deer instantly froze in midstep, jerking his head around to stare my way.

Don't you just love mature bucks? I sure do! Even after a lifetime spent chasing oversized antlers across much of North America, I still get the same adrenaline rush from close encounters with older pot-bellied, Roman-nosed bucks today as when I first left boot tracks in the Indiana deer woods decades ago. Actually, when the 2008 Hoosier bow season opened, my favorite treestand was hanging not many as-the-crow-flies miles from the same reclaimed strip mines and overgrown spoil banks where I arrowed my first Pope and Young Club record book buck in 1963.

It certainly was good to be home again. But, man, how Hoosier State deer hunting has changed!

The state's last native deer was shot in Knox County in 1893, and not until the mid-1930s did stocking programs reintroduce whitetails to a handful of southern counties.

Descendents of the 296 transplanted deer released between 1934 and 1942 soon multiplied and spread. By 1951, the Indiana deer herd was guesstimated at 5,000 animals and a residents-only, any-deer hunting season was held the first three days of November in 17 of the state's 92 counties.

Slug shotguns and archery tackle were the legal weapons du jour; a deer license cost $5.

When the gun smoke had cleared, hunters had checked in 1,590 whitetails, four of every 10 being antlered bucks. Not surprisingly, shotgunners accounted for most of those.

Archers reportedly tagged three deer. The overall success rate for 1951 tallied 13 percent.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, I had donned WWII Army surplus camo and picked up my Colt Huntsman recurve, along with a quiver full of cedar arrows tipped with Bear Razorheads. Deer numbers had increased to perhaps 25,000 statewide, but sightings were still few and far between. Hunting only weekends during the 1962 season, I saw exactly one deer -- a doe that I booted out of a briar jungle.

My deer sightings in 1963 weren't all that much better; however, on the final late-November day of the '63 bow season, I bumped a small "herd" containing several deer.

Trailing them into a brushy creekbottom, I blundered into a rut-goofy buck that wouldn't leave his lady friend. Unbelievably, he watched as I eased within 25 yards of where he'd cornered a doe in a patch of honeysuckle.