I killed my first mule deer in 1989. It was a doe. It was snowing hard, and she ran across the two-track road I was driving in eastern Montana. I jumped out, settled my Savage 99 .243 across the hood, and dumped her.

Since then, I’ve been deeply in love with mule deer. I’ve killed dozens of them, including some fair bucks. While I’ve never killed a whopper trophy, the hunt for him is what keeps me excited, and it’s the basis for our Record Quest program this year.

If you hunt them long enough, and in different places, mule deer will teach you plenty about stalking, shot selection, trophy judgment, and stamina. Here are 12 lessons I’ve learned, and the bucks that educated me.

Don’t Get Hung Up on Width
Here are two remarkable bucks. That’s me on the right, with a tall-tined Wyoming muley. It’s my buddy Jon LaCorte, who handles Nikon’s marketing and press business, on the left. This photo, and this hunt in southeastern Wyoming, is instructive for a couple of reasons. First, I’m hung up on wide mule deer, and for the longest time I was sure LaCorte had killed the better buck. But I finally measured my deer, years after I killed it, and its high tines and crazy-deep forks give it the better score. It’s not a whopper—it scores 186—but his bladed tines and fairly heavy antlers give it a better score than I expected. Incidentally, that’s Jon’s first mule deer. Not bad for a beginning buck, huh?