At the moment I am parked outside a strip-mall laundromat at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night in Jackson, Ohio, a working-class town of 10,000. Most of the locals are in bed by this hour. Not me. Four days into my hunt, I'm as hyper as Paris Hilton on an unescorted visit to a boys' prep school. By the green glow of my Streamlight headlamp, I am shuffling through six adjoining topo quads spread out over the dashboard, scarfing down an 18-hour-old sausage biscuit and a 20-ounce Pabst (discovered while Dumpster diving in my own backseat), and madly scanning the radio for a weather fix.

Inside the establishment, my Scent-Lok is tumbling around in a dryer hot enough to cook pizza, and my other hunting duds are swishing through a final rinse of Sport-Wash. By forgoing a real dinner, I can do a total scent overhaul and still make it back to my motel for five hours of rack time. At 4:30 a.m., my nervous system will go off automatically, sending me afield again for a chance at an Ohio bighead.

Meanwhile, I'm poring over the dog-eared topos, pressing them for the secrets only they can impart. After hours of agony, I have whittled the Miss Stand Site contestants down to two finalists for tomorrow morning: a shapely little ridge finger near Blue Hollow on the Pedro Quad and a perky bench along the stream in Pokepatch Hollow on the Gallia Quad. My whole world depends on the wind, and I'm endlessly scanning the radio for a weather report. But the night airwaves here have been seized by Bible study insurgents.

I note a faint odor of decay in the car and wonder if an unfinished sandwich from the recent past is out for revenge. A Jackson Township police cruiser rolls past, slowing to eyeball me. As always, any distraction from my quest fills me with indignation. Yes, I am sitting in a parked car at night wearing long underwear with a green light on my forehead. You got a problem with that? Evidently I look too whacked to be a real criminal, and the cruiser rolls on.

Searching for the source of the stench, I am drawn to my feet. I take off my shoes and socks and resist the impulse to scream aloud. I have a case of athlete's foot that would look at home in a leper colony. But there's no time to deal with that now. My immediate task is to figure out where I can put an arrow into a giant whitetail tomorrow in the Wayne National Forest.

Big Deer...
I discovered the Wayne last year, when I was looking for a place to bowhunt trophy bucks without having to pay a guide, an outfitter, or a lease fee. A review process including examination of QDMA maps of record-book deer and deer densities, state website inventories of public lands and hunting pressure, and the brain of every hunting buddy I could find soon had me leaning here: huge acreage, low pressure, and challenging terrain.

There be monsters here. Ohio is archery-only for most of November, so mature bucks enjoy high survival rates. On opening day of the 2005 season, Mike Rex killed a deer in nearby Athens County with antlers so big that he thought at first that he was looking at two bucks standing right behind each other (see box at right). For the number Nazis: Think 6x5 main frame and 13-inch brow tines.

...Big Land
A convergence of conditions natural and man-made make this part of southeastern Ohio a heaven for bowhunters with big dreams and little wallets. Most of the wooded country in Ohio is leased up by guys with more money than you, especially in the northwestern Corn Belt. The standout exception is the southeastern quadrant, Ohio's hardscrabble Appa¿¿la¿¿chian counties.

The glaciers that smoothed the rough edges of the land and dropped their load of rich topsoil during the last ice age never made it here. Geologically, it's part of the Unglaciated Allegheny Plateau, an elevated arc of shale, sandstone, and thin soils extending around southeastern Ohio into western Pennsylvania and the West Virginia panhandle. If you were a pioneer looking for prime farmland, you would probably have sifted the dirt through your fingers, said, "I didn't come all this way for this," and kept going. Deer, however, have always liked the rugged forests-oak, ash, hickory, and beech-just fine. The double bonus is that the three Wayne National Forest districts contain more than 237,000 acres of land-a lifetime's worth of country where a guy with a little grit can hunt until he either succeeds, has to go back to work and family, or loses his mind.

A bunch of guys from states near and far are already making the annual pilgrimage to this part of the Buckeye State. In the motel, I ran into Ricky Quaue, who comes up from Mississippi with friends to hunt. "I can drive up, go on a weeklong hunt, and have a chance of getting a monster for $500," he said. "Best so far this year is a 15-inch spread, but a boy from Hattiesburg killed a whopper." James Smith, from Tennessee, has been coming for years with five first cousins. "Big deer, nice folks, what's not to like?"

The hitch is that it's big-woods hunting. You know those neat little diagrams of imaginary hunting grounds in magazines (this one included) that show ambush points along fencelines, brush funnels, and power-line crossings? Forget 'em. This is subtler terrain. You will have to take your game to the next level to play here. The deer are more difficult, too, harder to pattern, seminomadic, and extremely wary. Spook one and he'll be gone for good before you ever lay eyes on him. And this year features a special wrinkle: a bumper crop of mast exceeding any in local memory, acorns and nuts two layers thick even in town parking lots. A deer can feed all day and scarcely have to turn its head. No matter. I am possessed of an attribute that surpasses all others: deranged perseverance.