Though the cedar kept Woods from detecting the buck until it was right on him, the masking had a positive side, too. “It also meant he couldn’t see me,” the hunter noted.

In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that Woods didn’t see the bruiser until it was so close. “If I’d seen him sooner, I might have got nervous and I might have missed,” he said. As it was, he walloped the buck with a shot from his .300 Savage rifle. But he wasn’t pleased with the buck’s initial reaction.

“Usually when I’ve shot a deer, they jump and run off,” he explained. “This one never flinched. He just kept right on walking; I had to ask at first if I had missed him. He went about 20 yards and laid down. I thought, ‘This is crazy! I’ve missed this buck, and now he’s going to bed right in front of me.’

“About that time he fell over.”

And the suspense hadn’t quite exhausted itself. “I got down out of my tree stand and walked to where he’d been and he was gone,” Woods said. “I had turned my back on him while I was climbing down and he’d gotten up. I went another 20 yards and found him in a brushpile.”

The excitement set in when Steve began counting points. “I came up with 14,” he recalled. “It struck me that this deer probably hadn’t been living where I killed him. I figured he came from the Fabian mines.”

This hunter counts points the old-fashioned way: If you can hang a ring on it, it’s a point. The man who later scored it came up with 13 scorable points measuring 1 inch or better.

The buck had an inside spread of 18 3/8 inches and gross-scored 161 1/8 B&C points. Unfortunately, 2 4/8 inches of deductions were assessed for lack of symmetry between the two sides of the rack, as well as another 9 1/8 inches for non-typical points, bringing the rack’s official B&C total down to 149 4/8 points.

“It was just my time to get one,” Woods said of harvesting the giant.

For a man who’d waited a lifetime to kill a super buck, the celebration was remarkably short and low-key. “I came around the house and my wife Delta was in the kitchen cooking biscuits and bacon for breakfast. She looked at me and said, ‘What are you mad about?’ I guess she thought I had missed another good one. I opened the door and said, ‘You won’t believe what I got -- it’s a 14-pointer.’”

“You did not,” was her reply -- to which her husband said, “I did too! And I need your help.”

Delta went back with him to load the buck on a 4-wheeler. In the excitement of the moment, she forgot to turn off the stove. “We burned the biscuits,” Woods said with a laugh.

He never could have loaded the buck by himself. It had a live weight of 210 pounds; making it easily the largest-bodied deer Woods had ever killed, as well as being his buck with the most impressive headgear.

It was all the husband-and-wife team could do to get it loaded, Woods pulling by the horns and Delta pushing from the back. “It helped that I was able to pull the 4-wheeler right up to him,” Woods said. “I backed the 4-wheeler into a little hole and that made it easier. There was no way I could have loaded it by myself. My dad lives nearby, but he’s 81, and I don’t know whether he could have helped.”