West Virginia's firearm season for buck deer is already half over, but hunters still have six days in which to seek their antlered quarry.

The vast majority of the bucks killed will have run-of-the-mill antlers - spike bucks, forkhorns, basket-racked six-pointers and the like. A minority will sport nice 8- to 10-point racks.

A few - a precious few - will be true trophies. Their racks will have wide inside spreads, remarkably long and heavy main beams, and long, thick tines.

Once in a great while, a record-breaking buck comes along. The last time that happened during a West Virginia gun season was 1995, when the state-record deer with symmetrical, or "typical," antlers was killed; and in 1998, when the non-typical record was taken.

In both instances, the hunters who killed the bucks happened to be in just the right place at exactly the right time.

For Junior Bailes, that place was on a logging clear-cut near Nettie in Nicholas County, and the time was early on a foggy November morning in 1995.

"I heard some deer moving toward me in the fog," Bailes said. "They turned out to be does, so I didn't pay much attention to them. I was just ready to take another step when I hear some brush crack behind the does. I looked up and saw a buck."

Problem was, the buck had also seen Bailes. It whirled and sprinted away.

"He was headed into some real thick undergrowth, and I didn't have a shot. I thought I'd blown my chance," Bailes said. "But then he turned and started loping up the hill, in front of me about 80 yards away. I saw that there was one chance at a shot through a small opening in the brush, so I swung the rifle over and waited for him to move into the clearing."

A single shot dropped the buck in its tracks.

"It went down so quick, I thought I'd missed," Bailes recalled.

Anxiously, the young hunter walked toward the opening to try to search for evidence his bullet had connected.

"Once I got within 40 yards, I could see the buck was down. It looked like his head had come to rest on a bush. But as I got closer, I could see that the buck's antlers were what held its head off the ground.

"All I could say was, 'Oh my gosh,'" Bailes said. "I started shaking so hard I had to sit down."

The buck's heavy main beams branched off into 10 antler points, each located at the tip of a long, graceful tine. Division of Natural Resources biologist Larry Berry scored the rack at 1854/8 inches on the Boone & Crockett Club scoring scale.

The total put Bailes' name at the head of the West Virginia record book for gun-killed typical whitetails, 3 1/8 inches ahead of Dr. Doug Given, who had held the record for 17 years with a 12-pointer killed on his family's Braxton County farm.

Two years after Bailes broke Given's record for typical-antlered deer, Ivan McLaughlin of Kermit broke the state's even longer-standing record for non-typicals.

Hunting in extreme southern Wayne County, McLaughlin entered the second day of the 1998 season looking for a trophy.

He had seen a 14- or 15-point buck during a pre-season scouting trip, and he spent the entire morning waiting for it to show. When it failed to show by 2 p.m., McLaughlin stood up to head home.

"On the way to the car, I saw two does running toward me. I figured something had stirred them up, so I went back to the stand."

Five deer soon came into view. One was the buck McLaughlin had been seeking, but it quickly moved into a stand of pines too thick to allow a shot. When McLaughlin moved to find a better shooting position, all five deer spooked.

"I snapped off three shots at the big one, but none of them connected," he recalled.

Thoroughly disgusted, McLaughlin sat down to reload.

"As I was sitting there, I heard something coming through the woods toward me. It was a buck, running straight toward me. He was moving too fast to allow a shot, so I let him go by. He went down over the hill and stopped. Meanwhile, I heard another deer running behind me. It was a big buck, and it was running to head the smaller buck off."

McLaughlin whistled, hoping the sound would slow the buck down. It did.

"He was quartering away from me, about 75 yards down the hill. I got the scope on him and fired off two rounds."

Both bullets found their mark, and the buck fell just 35 yards from where it was shot.

In his haste to shoot, McLaughlin paid scarce attention to the bucks' antlers. Only when he started counting antler points did their sheer size sink in.

"After I got up to 20 points, I said, 'My God, I've done something right for a change,'" he recalled. "When I got up to 29, I just stopped counting because I couldn't believe it."

As it turned out, the antlers had 31 points. After the required 60-day drying period, an official scorer measured the rack at 2315/8 inches - more than 23 inches larger than the previous record-holder, killed by James Pauley in Mason County nearly 31 years before.

Both Bailes and McLaughlin called their bucks "trophies of a lifetime." They might be right. In the 15 years since Bailes killed his buck and the 13 years since McLaughlin killed his, no Mountain State hunter has come close to either.