Take a gander at the Boone and Crockett record books for Montana nontypical mule deer and you'll note that many of the entries were made 20, 30, even 80 years ago.

For a number of reasons - drought, genetics or a liberal deer season - big bucks just aren't as common as they used to be.

That makes Jack Rosander's trophy even more remarkable. Last year, Rosander took a nontypical mule deer buck that scored 236-6/8 right on the outskirts of the Eastern Montana town of Colstrip. The score earned Rosander's buck a ranking of 46th out of 77 record-book nontypical mule deer in Montana and the only one to ever come from Rosebud County.

A minimum score of 215 is needed to make the Montana book. Boone and Crockett's minimum is 230. Bucks are scored based on numerous measurements of their antlers, such as number of points, antler girth and the distance between the deer's antlers.

"I'd seen this deer for three years, and a lot of people around Colstrip had seen him," Rosander said. "There's a photo of him standing two doors east of my house inside a chain-link fence eating crab apples in a snowstorm."

Given the size of the deer, and the fact that there are quite a few hunters in Colstrip, Rosander said he was lucky to be the one to claim the trophy.

"I just feel really fortunate," Rosander said. "Sooner or later, someone was going to get that deer. I'm sure there were some hard feelings, but most everybody was super happy for me."

Rosander, 52, is a product supervisor for Western Energy in Colstrip, where he's worked for 25 years. He's the one who talked the company into opening up the mile-square area three years ago where he eventually took the trophy buck. The area, north of Western Energy's office, is for employees only and limited to black powder, archery and shotgun hunting. A lightly forested area of jack pine surrounded by an open-pit mine, it doesn't seem like a place you'd find a trophy.

The buck had been seen with about 30 other deer last hunting season, Rosander said, but it never came into a legal hunting area, opting instead to stay on reclamation land that wasn't open.

But on Nov. 5, Rosander's luck changed - at first it seemed for the worse.

After reserving the day to hunt, he bumped into his friend and co-worker Joe Novasio on the way into the area and asked him to go along.

"Joe's a nonhunter, but he likes to look at deer," Rosander said.

Rosander could see from scouting the reclamation area's deer that the bruiser buck was nowhere to be seen.

"So we went snooping around and found him and a doe," Rosander said.

Rosander was packing his Thompson/Center .54-caliber Hawken cap lock rifle with iron sights. When he spotted the buck, he used a rangefinder that put the deer at 133 yards distant.

"He was just out in the open" intent on breeding the doe, Rosander said. "I knew I couldn't get any closer."

He turned to Novasio, asking what he should do. "Shoot!" Novasio advised him.

Taking aim from a kneeling position, Rosander's seemingly good luck took a turn for the worse when he pulled the trigger and the gun misfired. The pop of the cap going off, which is supposed to ignite the black powder in the chamber, sounded like a .22 rifle being fired.

"It got his attention," Rosander said.

Working quickly, he recapped the rifle and took aim at the deer, which by now was walking away from him at an angle. Rosander squeezed the trigger again. This time the shot rang out and the deer took off.

Rosander knew he'd hit the deer.

"I was just sick that I'd crippled a deer that big," he said.

He'd passed up a shot on the same deer two years earlier in the last hour of the last day of the season.

"He came by me right in the wide open," Rosander recalled. "He had two does with him. But it was 200-plus yards, and they were wild."

Back then, he didn't risk a shot with the iron-sighted Hawken, fearing he'd miss or wound the buck. The next year, the area wasn't opened to hunting.

After pulling the trigger and watching the buck run off, Rosander sat and went over the possibilities with Novasio. Then they decided to split up in search of the deer. It wasn't long before Novasio came running up, saying he'd found the buck. About an hour had elapsed.

"The deer had not gone far from where I initially shot him," Rosander said. "He laid down right in some small pine trees."

Rosander crawled up a hill to make sure it was the same buck he'd shot.

"I couldn't see his horns very well," he said. "What gave it away was his hurt leg was laying out so I knew it was him."

Turns out, his initial shot had hit the deer high on the left front leg.

From 80 yards, Rosander drew a bead and shot again, this time dispatching the deer.

The buck turned out to be 7½ years old. Although big-bodied, Rosander never got a weight on the bruiser buck. When scored, the deer had 11 points on one side of its rack and 13 on the other. His main beams measured 27 inches, and the outside measurement was 32 inches, Rosander said.

He e-mailed photos of the big deer to his friend, Randy Shores, in Malta, and before long they were circulating in e-mails across the country.

"It's showed up a lot of places," Rosander said, including a North Dakota Web site. "I sent it to one or two people, friends, and then it ended up everywhere."

The chances of another such buck coming out of Rosebud County are good, provided it can survive to maturity.

"I can see some of the genes of that same deer down there right now," Rosander said. "So he's in the gene pool of that country."

Bagging such a great trophy hasn't made Rosander hungry for another one nor, on the other hand, diminished his desire to hunt. He has been hunting since he was old enough to carry a gun. Now, he enjoys traveling afield with his son, Karson, 22, of Billings.

"I'll always go out," he said. "Karson and I spend a lot of time hunting together."