I'd seen photos of men with huge smiles gripping awe- nspiring antlers. So I arrived in eastern Colorado with huge expectations and unwarranted confidence.

I knew my chances of tagging a behemoth buck were better here than nearly anywhere else in a state known for world-class mule deer hunting --only I'd been made to understand that shooting was likely to involve longer than average stabs. These long shots are often what separate the winners and losers.

I understood all this. Still, my first sight of our hunting grounds produced only apprehension and doubt.

The land seemed bleak -- stark and forsaken, with very little topography and even less stalking cover -- a far cry from the gorgeous alpine habitat of better-known locations in the state, and the sagebrush mesas I've hunted farther north.

Aaron Neilson, owner of Adventures Wild, began hunting mulies on Colorado's Eastern Plains before most hunters ever heard about the area. With this leg up, he leased a good portion of prime habitat in his hunting area, at a time when every rancher and outdoorsman in the state had taken to outfitting as a way of subsidizing a living. The Eastern Plains area is no longer the sleeper it once was, since news got out about its outlandishly sized mule deer.

Aaron leases about 400,000 acres of private land in several prime units. Of course, not every pasture in the Eastern Plains expanse holds deer. But they're there -- between the agricultural fields of dry-land milo, irrigated corn and alfalfa, along the wandering swatches of creekbed cover and across the rolling miles of Conservation Reserve Program land and cattle pasture.

You have to go out and look for eastern Colorado mule deer and whitetail. And hunting in such a desolate place takes getting used to.

My guide Scott Franklin and I started the day cruising the edges of vast milo fields. We were reluctant to leave the truck and its heater, so welcome against the biting chill outside and a knife-edged breeze. We stopped occasionally to glass distant gray grubs ghosting through the morning gloom.

The rut was in full swing on this second week of November. It was easy to spot bucks at the edges of large groups of feeding does. Deer grow fat on these vast fields of scattered crops, and bucks here produce incredible antlers.

In the following hour, we spotted several nice bucks. Some of these deer would have me chomping at the bit at home in southern New Mexico. Franklin dismissed them with a flick of the wrist. Already we'd seen three bucks that would easily pass Pope and Young's 145-inch minimums for the archery record book.

As the deer filtered out of the fields and into the adjacent pasture of rolling sand hills, I began to see that this seemingly featureless terrain offers more than meets the eye. The deer began to dissolve into the landscape like smoke before the wind.

We stopped on a rise and quickly found more deer, including a whitetail buck -- a bruiser 4x5 that might score 155 -- that made me rethink my conviction to hunt only mulies. My tag was valid for either mule deer or whitetail.

My resolve dissolved. Franklin and I stalked the buck.