The Boone and Crockett Club sets the ultimate benchmark for the term "trophy animal."

In the case of the whitetail deer, a buck whose rack exceeds B&C's minimum score of 170 all-time (160 awards) for typicals and 195 all-time (185 awards) for non-typicals is often described as "a buck in a million." That's actually an optimistic ratio across North America as a whole -- but not in Missouri. In fact, from 1996 through 2005, Missouri logged 222 B&C bucks out of a total antlered deer harvest of well under 1 million.

Although I'm certainly in a great position to know that Missouri's a great trophy whitetail state, I'll admit to being surprised at the number of bucks reported to B&C in the past 10 years. Truth be told, I'd chosen 10 years primarily because it allows sufficient time for more than one generation of bucks in a given area to reach trophy size without allowing enough time to allow for shifting trophy production patterns. Further research revealed that Missouri has produced 359 entries since 1986.

Missouri's impressive showing between 1986 and 1995 (137 B&C bucks) demonstrates that the state was producing huge-racked whitetails before management of the state's deer herd began to require ever-increasing harvests of antlerless deer. Even so, the fact that the 222 B&C entries recorded between 1996 and 2005 represent 62 percent of all the B&C bucks taken in Missouri over the past 20 years is even more exciting. Boiled down to the essence, these figures strongly suggest that the time to hunt super-trophy bucks in Missouri is right now.

Unfortunately, telling you to hunt "in Missouri" doesn't help very much. If location is vital in the case of the 140- or 155-class bucks we usually discuss in this section -- and it is -- picking the right spot to spend the hunting season is even more so if you dream of taking a B&C trophy. To try to narrow the search for that "right spot," I sorted the 222 1996-2005 trophy bucks by the region and county in which they were taken. Here's what those efforts revealed.

THE NORTHEAST REGION
Conventional wisdom, to say nothing of common sense, would indicate that the Northeast Region, which leads the state in overall deer harvest and in the Missouri Show-Me Big Bucks Club record book, could not possibly be the best place in the state to find bucks that live long enough to produce B&C racks. Logical though such reasoning might be, it's false. In fact, 28.8 percent of all the B&C trophy bucks taken anywhere in Missouri during the past 10 years have come from the Northeast Region. That's 42 typicals and 22 non-typicals.

Every one of the region's 15 counties tallied at least one B&C buck during the study period, a distinction the Northeast shares with no other region. Pike (8) led the way followed by Adair (7), Macon (7), Putnam (6), Knox (6), Lewis (6), Randolph (5), Monroe (4), Sullivan (3), Scotland (3), Clark (3), Marion (2), Shelby (1), and Ralls (1). Note that Lewis, Knox, Adair, Putnam, and Macon form the T-shaped "Booner Alley" that has long since earned its place in Missouri deer hunting lore.