Now, six inches off my nose, the rock turned vertical and crumbly, the slope below me was a vertiginous rock bed with the occasional tuft of grass. The rock would break my bones; the grass would soak up my blood. I climbed up and up with hands and feet, without thought or question, lured by a deer. Then a chunk of rock let loose, and I slipped.
    That's when I realized the SOB was out to kill me. Not out of malice. The mountain had nothing against me. Killing people is just something mountains do. It's a skill that defines the big ones. The good ones.
    The mountain had set me up seven years earlier when it showed me another face, literally and figuratively. I'd been hunting elk, not mule deer, contouring the back side, the western slope, at about 11,000 feet, 2000 feet beneath the summit. I came on a huge bowl of rock, an amphitheater that took my breath away, it was so pretty. Vertical rock dropped 500 feet to a band of scree and boulders. Below that circled a belt of grass. A small stream collected the runoff of a waterfall that spilled from a snowbank high above. The bowl's very presence was so great that I couldn't take it all in without turning my head. I stopped in a grove of aspen, the front rank of timberline, took off my pack, and glassed the rimrock and scree and wispy yellow grass.
    I wasn't looking for anything in particular, and I wasn't seeing anything, but a view like that invites scrutiny. My hunting partner, who had lagged behind, wrestling with a Snickers bar buried in the bottom of his pack, caught up and sat next to me. He is a Westerner and has those big-sky eyes that can spot life a mile away. He looked at the bowl for a few seconds, then asked, "What's that about halfway up, just down from the light rock on the left side?"
    What he saw is what got me up that reef seven years later, the carrot in front of death's stick.
    What he saw was a group of five deer, all big, mature bucks, but one was bigger than the others. Bigger, like the Hope diamond is bigger than the stone in a $200 engagement ring.
    The buck mesmerized us. He was so much larger than his friends that we first thought he was a wayward elk or some strange hybrid or simply a dream. Although his body blended into the mountain, we could see his rack without binoculars. My friend, who has seen and killed many large mule deer in his time, thought the deer carried more than 30 inches between his beams.
    We watched the deer for an hour. Watching was all we could do. There was no approach. They were above the scree, walking tenuously on a trail high up in what appeared to be vertical rock. If God had struck them blind and given them head colds, we couldn't have gotten near them without ropes or a helicopter. So we watched and let their image burn into our memories, where, for the next seven years, it fumed and smoldered until we couldn't stand it anymore.
    So we went back. We knew the big deer wouldn't still be there, although he hung on for at least three more years. (A pilot friend flew the bowl and saw him several times. He knows what a big deer looks like, too, because he'd flown a trophy hunter who had put a number of mulies in the book, and when he saw that deer of ours, high up in the bowl, he nearly peeled his plane into the rock. Never seen anything close to that size, he said. His trophy-hunting client would kill for that deer, but we reminded him that we might, too, so he kept it to himself.)