I have been around whitetail deer all my life. My dad and his hunting buddy shot the first two licensed whitetails in my Illinois home county way back in 1970, in the woods near our house. I bagged my first deer two years later when I was eleven, a feat that made the local paper - and mady my Dad awful proud. I can still remember everything about that day. Dad put me, with my 20-guage Ithaca pump-gun, on a fence-line just down from a little patch of woods where we'd found a lot of fresh buck sign. Then, he circled the patch and pushed through it toward me. When I saw the deer, I shot quickly. When Dad came running and huffing up the hill and asked if I hit it, I had no idea. But I showed him where it jumped over the fence, and as we approached we saw it. I don't think I have ever seen my Dad happier, and after the man from the paper came out to our house, my Mom and sisters treated me like a celebrity for several, or at least a few days. For all the big-game and trophy hunting I've been blessed to experience since then, I still respect an old whitetail buck the most of all. He is smarter and warier than the other animals in the woods, and if you make even one small mistake in pursuing him, he'll be gone in a flash...