Wilbur raised his Browning A-Bolt chambered in .300 WSM and trained the cross hairs of his Leupold VariXIII 3.5x14 on the buck's chest. "The first shot was a lung shot," Wilbur said. "He buckled and then took off for the woods. He only had to make it 60 yards to the woods, so I jacked another bullet in and I shot him a little far back and he straightened his back legs out and I thought he was going down. The third shot was a heart shot. I didn't want him to make it to the woods. I didn't want to take a chance of not finding that deer. The biggest thing I remember is that on the first shot there wasn't any nervousness involved, but the last two shots, there were a lot of nerves involved. The area he was heading was real thick. We have lost a couple of deer in there, and I did not want to take that chance."

Interestingly enough, Wilbur had a witness to his record-book kill. Sitting in his truck on the road was TWRA wildlife officer Rob Colvin. "I was watching the buck chase the doe and heard the shots and saw the buck go down," Colvin said.

"The whole thing couldn't have lasted more than two minutes," Wilbur said. "It was a boring hunt for that particular deer until the end. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would kill a deer like that. I went to Illinois in 2006 and Missouri and didn't kill a deer. I actually missed opening weekend in Tennessee because we were gun hunting in Missouri. But for the past 15 or 20 years, about all of our hunting has been right there in Haywood County. It was only my 10th buck in 25 years, but I didn't hunt really hard a lot of those early years."

Like many other Tennessee deer hunters, Wilbur and six of his close friends, including John Pafford from Eades and Charlie Gaines of Clarksville, have put limitations on what kind of bucks they were killing on their hunting lease.

"What we did over the last seven years is we started a 6-point-or-better rule, and the past couple of years we said the bucks had to be mounters," Wilbur said. "We've been killing a lot of does until last season. I killed a doe during muzzleloader season and it was the only doe we killed last year. We mostly saw small bucks in 2006. Generally, we kill two or three good bucks each season, but in 2006, we killed seven good bucks. We have a rule that if you kill a buck your next one has to be bigger, so I didn't kill any more. The weekend before the season closed, I had a beautiful 140-class 8-pointer 20 yards from me and I had to pass him. We've seen a lot of basket-rack deer, and I guess letting a lot more bucks walk paid off."

Wilbur's 20-point buck was aged at 5 1/2 years old. After the required 60-day drying period, Alan Peterson, the TWRA's Region 1 big-game biologist and official Boone and Crockett scorer, measured the buck. The buck sported a typical 10-point frame with 10 additional non-typical points. The buck's typical frame gross scored 169 5/8 and had 7 6/8 inches of deductions. The 10 non-typical points racked up an additional 33 5/8 inches of bone. The buck's inside spread measured 17 5/8, and its greatest spread was 19 3/8 inches. The final net non-typical score was 195 4/8, which will place it in the Boone and Crockett all-time record book.

It has been said that luck is preparation meeting opportunity, and those elements can be found in this story. However, there's an ironic twist of fate, too.

"Actually my son-in-law, Steven Pickett from Bartlett, was supposed to hunt that stand that morning," Wilbur said.

We all have stories in our deer-hunting past that have a similar turn of events. These chance encounters with big bucks, or the hopes of a close encounter, is what keeps us coming back for more each year.