When the author saw this big Kentucky buck step out, he realized that the deer had an outside spread of nearly 24 inches. But the hunter was in for a surprise. Photo by Ron Sinfelt

How powerful is a whitetail's breeding instinct? It's so strong that not even a serious injury will necessarily keep him from his appointed doe-chasing rounds.

All sorts of calamities can befall a buck during the rut. This is perhaps his most vulnerable time of the year, to some extent due simply to the odds. A buck covers more ground during the rut, and the more hours he's on the move, the greater the probability of his encountering some threat to his wellbeing. And many of the dangers bucks face then are neither broadheads nor bullets.

The threat could be in the form of a speeding vehicle -- deer-auto collisions tend to be highest during the rut -- but cars and trucks are by no means the only non-hunting dangers. Deer country is often filled with wire fences, and a miscalculated jump can lead to lethal entanglement. And then there's the peril of having to tangle with one's own brethren. In some cases, a buck's greatest danger comes from the same bucks that were his buddies back in the summer, before their interest turned to girls.

We see photos and hear tales of big bucks locked together in combat, the regal racks that empowered them ironically leading to their demise. While hardly common, such cases aren't as rare as you might suppose. Each year at North American Whitetail magazine, we receive word of a number of these lockups, and doubtless many more are never discovered by man.

Most rut confrontations don't lead to locked antlers, or even serious engagements of headgear. Typically, one buck soon admits inferiority and vacates the area, leaving the spoils to his rival. But in areas inhabited by two or more bucks of fairly equal stature, the result can be a vigorous battle that leads to bruised bodies, broken antlers and even a lost eye for one or both combatants.

Twice in my hunting career I've shot bucks that had lost an eye, presumably during the rut. And in neither case did it appear to have diminished the deer's libido one bit.

The first of these bucks I shot back in mid-November 1994 while hunting in western Alberta with outfitter Byron Stewart. Hunting back in a pine thicket, I rattled the tall-tined 8-pointer to within 17 yards of my ambush in a clump of bulldozered tree roots. After recovering the buck, I noticed that his left eye -- the one nearer me as he walked in to check out the source of the rattling -- had been gouged out. Although the eyeball remained in place, it had turned yellow and was inoperative. There were no obvious wounds on the rest of the buck's head or body, but I'm confident the damage was caused by a wayward antler.

The next time I shot a "half-blind" buck was in mid-November 2004. I was hunting at R&W Game Trails near Marion, Kentucky, as a guest of Thompson/Center Arms. Cameraman Ron Sinfelt and I were on hand to film for North American Whitetail Television.

Guide Dirk McTavish had picked out a good spot for us to try an all-day sit, in a hardwood bowl above a cut soybean field. We eased into position before daybreak and settled in.

Not long after shooting light came, we spotted a nice buck off to our right, feeding through heavy cover. But he never gave us a good look. Later in the morning, a 2 1/2-year-old buck trailed a doe and fawn right by us, but he wasn't a deer we wanted to shoot. Same for another 2 1/2-year-old we saw dogging a doe on the ridge above us just after lunch.

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