Mike Wilbur with the 20-point non-typical that he killed last year on land he had hunted for nearly two decades. Photo courtesy of Mike Wilbur.

The 2007 Tennessee deer season has been described many ways. To say that the season was "weird" might sound funny to outsiders, but to those of us who experienced it, the term fits like a glove. Drought, a sparse mast crop and other factors influenced deer movement patterns that put a host of trophy-class bucks in the sights of a large number of Volunteer State deer hunters.

One of the most notable instances of this was a Memphis deer hunter who scored on the buck of a lifetime on the opening day of modern firearms season.

Mike Wilbur, a 48-year-old electrical contractor from the River City, has hunted the same Haywood County farm with his close friends for nearly two decades. When Tennessee Sportsman caught up with Wilbur, he was repairing the wiring at a bank that had been recently ravaged by a tornado in Jackson, Tennessee.

The experience Wilbur had gained in 25 years of pursuing whitetails, and his long-term familiarity with the same piece of property, paid off with a huge non-typical buck that has helped fuel the notion that Tennessee is an up-and-coming big-buck state.

In spite of the tough conditions, Wilbur, like many other veteran Tennessee deer hunters, played the hand he was dealt.

"Last season was weird," Wilbur said. "We weren't seeing as many deer and they were tough to pattern. Where we had traditionally seen deer, we weren't seeing deer. The first and second week of bow season was terrible. It was so hot that we didn't see any deer. It wasn't until the last week of gun season that we saw three nice bucks, with the exception of the one I killed on opening day."

But what a spectacular day it was! Wilbur and a few members of his hunting club made the hour's drive east to their 800-acre lease in Haywood County. In an area made up of predominantly agricultural land consisting of cotton and soybeans, many of their stands overlook fields at strategic locations.

In the pre-dawn darkness, he trudged along the edge of a 75-acre field toward his ladder stand. Mostly cotton, the field stretched for more than 800 yards along a lonely paved county road with a 13-acre patch of cut soybeans that lay tucked against a thick patch of woods in the back of the field. Quietly climbing into a Cabela's metal ladder stand that had been positioned there six years before, Wilbur got ready.

When asked why he chose that particular stand, Wilbur said, "It's just always been a good stand during the rut, and the wind was right. There's always a lot of activity in that area. We've got quite a few stands around that field, too."

It wasn't the first time that the lucky hunter had hunted that stand in 2007.

"I had hunted that stand quite often," Wilbur recalled. "During bow season, there was quite a bit of activity. During muzzleloader season, I hunted it once and didn't see anything. It's typically a better afternoon stand, but we've killed several does from that stand, so that's where I wanted to hunt."

Not long after daylight, the action began. "I had seen a deer at 6:30, but I didn't see anything else for more than two hours, so I was a bit down about it," Wilbur said. "At 9 a.m., I saw a doe come off a wooded point 300 yards away. Then the doe got into the thick stuff along a ditch line heading toward me -- with a buck right behind her. When the first buck was chasing the doe in the thicket along the ditch, I could tell he had a lot of stuff on his head. Then I saw a second buck bust out of that point, and I hollered at him and he stopped. I was getting ready to raise the binoculars to look at the second buck when the doe and the big buck appeared running toward me. The first buck stopped on his own 50 yards away and I threw down the binoculars, but the doe kept running."