I first thought that some sagebrush had miraculously levitated off the ground. But there was no tornado or vortex in sight, or in the forecast. I quickly realized that this conglomeration of points and stickers was attached to a mule deer that was rapidly departing in the opposite direction.

I brought my Browning to my shoulder and peered through the scope. But the opportunity for a clean kill never presented itself, and the buck bounded over the horizon and into my dreams.

He was the largest mulie I have ever encountered while hunting and worthy of documentation in the book of "Daniel and Davy."

A couple days later, I missed the one shot I had at a mature 4-point. But eventually we found smaller bucks to put our tags on and went home happy at the end of the five-day hunt, with every tag in camp punched.

That was back in 1996 while hunting in Oregon's Outback, that region south of Highway 20 and east of Highway 395 -- closer to the middle of nowhere than any town with a Costco.

This experience was fairly typical for deer hunters in the '90s (except for that encounter with the giant, but he was atypical in every sense of the word!) who ventured well off the beaten path into the great desert canyons and the moonscape-like terrain that is Oregon's High Desert.

The names of Steens, Malheur, Trout Creeks, Owyhee and Silvies stirred images for me of heavy 4x4s bedded beneath rim-rock bluffs. Those place names still do, but in the last decade, their bucks have become much harder to find.

So what happened to all those giant desert bucks that these areas were famous for?

"The quality of the habitat has changed in the last 30 or 40 years. There are more juniper trees than there used to be, due to lack of fire, and the quality of the forage has certainly diminished," says Ron Garner, Hines District Biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

"More recently, the drought -- which we have finally gotten out of -- was really hurting fawn recruitment. Obviously, if you have fewer deer, you have fewer big bucks. And the rise in the cougar population has increased the number of deer lost to predation."

Indeed, cougars are one particular factor for lower deer numbers that cannot be ignored. Since 1994, when Oregon voters banned the pursuit of cougars and bears with dogs, the ODFW estimates that cougar numbers in Oregon have grown to about 5,500 -- nearly twice that of 10 years ago, before the hunting restrictions went into effect.

Randy Wills of Bend has been hunting the southeast deer units since 1992.

"When I first started hunting out there, the bucks were always down in the canyons near the seeps, springs, and shady rimrock," he recalls. "But we just don't seem to find them there anymore. Every big buck I've killed in the last five or six years has been up in the sage flats. I think they get pushed out of the canyons by other hunters and cats. I've seen more cougar tracks in the past two years than ever, and I think that this is affecting not only deer numbers, but buck behavior."