Richard Gates cut an angle to where he last saw the wounded giant. And as he rounded a cluster of trees, the hunter and the hunted came face to face, at less than 10 yards!

MASTROIANNI'S MONSTERS!
Of course, Suffolk County isn't the only place big bucks fell to archers in 2006. In fact, great archery bucks came from nearly every county in this diverse state.

For example, Lewis County hunter James Mastroianni arrowed a mammoth 16-point non-typical on Oct. 26. His buck grossed 179 2/8 and netted 166 6/8 Pope and Young points.

And a few weeks later, he took another huge buck in Schoharie County with a shotgun.

James Mastroianni is an experienced hunter with over 30 years in the woods. His passion is white-tailed deer, and he takes his deer hunting very seriously.

He spends as much time as possible in the woods, getting to know the lay of the land and studying the surroundings.

As is often the case with die-hard deer hunters, he hunts with bow, muzzleloader, shotgun and rifle.

He's promised himself that each buck he takes has to be as big (or bigger) than the previous year's deer.

That's a tall order -- no easy task for any hunter. But Mastroianni hunts very long and hard in some outstanding areas, including in the rugged Adirondack Mountains, down south in the beautiful Catskill Mountain region and in Schoharie Valley.

Surprisingly, he had been blessed to have accomplished that goal every year for 10 straight years. For the past several years, each of his bucks has dressed over 200 pounds; the heaviest was 240 pounds dressed.

In these past 10 years, he has also allowed many big bucks to walk away. It hasn't been easy to let them go by, but he felt compelled to stay true to his pact.

He hunts in the most secluded and isolated properties he can find in the Adirondack Region. One of the special properties he hunts is privately owned, and on it he built a spike camp, 1 1/2 miles off the dirt road.

He stays in the camp for days or even a week at a time before coming out again to "civilization."

In 2006, his pre-scouting before bow season led him to believe that the monster buck he was after -- the same buck he had seen two years before -- was still in the same area.

He was one of the smartest and most clever bucks Mastroianni ever hunted. But after the third season, the hunter finally figured out his routine.

Because Mastroianni plans on staying in the woods all day for days at a time, he has built a permanent tree stand on the property, set up so that his feet will be a minimum of 20 feet above the ground and he'll be above any buck's line of sight when he comes through the thick pines.

On his fifth straight day of hunting, Mastroianni approached his stand before first light and could hear two bucks locking horns in the predawn silence. Those deer sounded as if they were over 100 yards away.

He got to his stand about 6:30 a.m. and, after seeing just three does, around 8 a.m. he heard the faint steps and crunching of leaves.

Mastroianni thought he heard antlers brushing against the thick underbrush and low-hanging pine branches -- a sound he will never forget.

Was this the buck he had been after for the past three seasons?

The deer approached. Mastroianni could see hooves coming through the pines -- then front legs, and a white throat. And then a nose.

Mastroianni's heart started pounding as he saw the buck's antlers moving back and forth through the tangled undergrowth.