Last year, two Arkansas hunters took bucks scoring high enough to be eligible for entry into the all-time record book of the Boone and Crockett Club, the nation's oldest records-keeping organization for big game. Those hunters were 14-year-old Coty Bones of Holly Grove and Rod Alexander of Marion. Both their bucks have been featured in previous issues of Arkansas Sportsman.

Two Booners in one year is slightly below the state's annual average, which has stood at just over four since about 1990 or so. The reason for the decline? Probably the extreme drought that gripped the state for much of last summer and persisted throughout the fall.

In Mother Nature's scheme of things, nutritional intake goes first to the animal's body; only after that requirement is satisfied is it the headgear's turn. Since the body attains maximum growth by about mid-August, years in which dry weather after that time degrades the food sources' quantity and quality -- like last year, for example -- see antler size go down.

As I travel throughout the state with the Monster Whitetails of Arkansas traveling big-buck display I'm often asked how the Natural state ranks nationally in terms of big buck production. If you consider only the deer that are actually entered into the B&C all-time record book, our state has a total of 84, and ranks 17th. However, there are an additional 32 bucks that have been scored by official B&C personnel but for various reasons were never entered into the book. If those deer were added, making the state's total 116, it would raise Arkansas to 14th nationwide.

If you consider only the Southeastern region, it's quite a different story. Arkansas ranks No. 2 in the region, behind only behind Kentucky, in terms of B&C bucks produced.

Where's the best place to kill a big buck in Arkansas? Back in 1992, when I was involved with the old Arkansas Big Bucks Association, I started keeping records lists of the biggest bucks our state had ever produced. Even after that organization went under I kept working on those lists, aided by B&C, Pope & Young and Buckmasters scorers who contacted me when they scored a deer big enough to be added.

Today there are 906 bucks (734 typicals and 172 non-typicals) in what I have dubbed the "Arkansas Trophy Club." An eligible buck will have a net score of 150 points typical or 175 points non-typical using the B&C scoring system.

Naturally, as time went by I noted the areas that the bucks entered onto that list were coming from and, using those data, coined the phrase "Arkansas Trophy Triangle" some years back: On a map of Arkansas, draw a line from Little Rock northeast through Jonesboro all the way up to the Missouri Bootheel; draw another line southeast through Pine Bluff all the way to the Mississippi River. Within the boundaries of that lop-sided triangle, just over 75 percent of the state's largest bucks of all time have been taken.

Take a look at the graphics included with this article. Every single county listed in both B&C production and Trophy Club production lie within the boundaries of the triangle. Some of those deer were killed as recently as last season; others go back as far as 1923, when George Matthews took his 177 7/8 buck, Arkansas' first B&C trophy, down in Chicot County. Big bucks have been there for generations, are there now, and will be there in the future!