Good optics are usually the best solution for making absolutely certain you're seeing what you think you're seeing. In open country, generally, the more magnification the better. However, in close cover too much magnification may make average-size antlers and horns seem larger than they really are.

You've been on your stand for hours, alert and watchful. You haven't seen anything--nothing at all--and you're fighting boredom and drowsiness. Then, there it is: movement, over there in the brush. You freeze, rotating only your eyes toward the spot. Again, just a flicker. Then a tan shape separates from the gray branches as the buck steps out. Your breath catches as you see the fine rack. Slowly, you bring up the rifle, steady the shaking crosshairs just behind the shoulder and squeeze the trigger.

At the shot, the buck is off into the brush, but you know the shot was good. You wait a few minutes, then climb out of your stand and walk to the last spot you saw him. You know you got him, and your imagination runs wild: He was huge, surely the buck of a lifetime! You enter the woods, scanning the ground carefully for blood, and then you see your buck, lying still a few yards ahead. You rush to him and then stop, confused. It's a buck, all right, but his antlers are small and spindly, nothing like you'd envisioned. What happened to the monster you saw?

We call it "ground shrinkage," and it happens all the time, even to the most experienced hunters among us. The human mind is a wonderful tool, but it isn't perfect. As any magician can tell you, we tend to see what we want most to see, regardless of what is actually there. An error as described probably doesn't help herd management, and if the shrinkage is extreme, your ego may take a beating when you get back to camp. But provided you at least got the sex right and you haven't breached any size restrictions, there isn't much harm done if you bring in a buck smaller than what you thought you were shooting.

It can be worse than that. I live in an area where our reintroduced tule elk herd is growing rapidly. Every fall somebody shoots an elk, thinking it's a very big deer. In the Rockies they've had the same problem with introductions of Shiras moose.

Are there really hunters so unaware that they can't tell the difference among deer, elk and moose? I think the more likely answer is that their minds played tricks on them. They wanted to see the game they were seeking so badly that, in fact, they did--but what they saw wasn't reality. As we know, it can be even worse. Hunters have shot horses and cows, mistaking them for game. Thanks to hunter education and blaze-orange sartorial requirements, human tragedies are very rare today but, sadly, not altogether erased.

We all know that it's a commandment of firearms safety to "Be sure of your target and everything behind your target." That always applies, but what I'm talking about isn't exactly the same: You are sure of your target, but your target isn't exactly what your eyes and your mind tell you it is.

Self-knowledge is important. Experience counts, although some folks will always be more excitable than others. There is no shortcut to experience, so if you're lacking in that area, you need to acknowledge that and make yourself slow down and make absolutely sure. Ditto (maybe double ditto!) if you know you're subject to buck fever.

To my thinking there is no excuse--ever--for taking the wrong sex or species of game, let alone for a hunting accident, but I'm sure that, sometimes, the person making the inexcusable error really believed he saw something different from what was really there. This is what ground shrinkage really is. The scary part is that we're all subject to these mental mistakes, and it's only a matter of degree between a few inches of antler, a game violation and a tragedy.

Just last week I was whitetail hunting in Georgia, watching a long cutline through a stand of pines. I had seen enough deer to know that if a good buck stepped out, I would have very little time to judge him, get on him and make the shot. I also knew there were a couple of good bucks in the area because my host, Zack Aultman, had videotaped them from that very stand. Over the course of a couple of days I passed a half-dozen young bucks, including a couple of impressive young eight-pointers. The full moon was up, and it was unseasonably warm; I doubted that a good buck would show in daylight.

Sound like the imaginary scenario I started with? Pretty close. It was 9:45 and getting very warm when I saw movement far up along the right-hand edge of the cutline. I raised the binoculars just once. The buck was still in the brush, quartering to me, head down, and I saw his long right beam and a picket fence of antler points. I knew I hadn't seen this buck before, and my mind saw him as one of the good ones. I moved to the .300 Jarrett, already set in position. This late in the day the buck was almost certainly traveling to his bedding ground; I'd be lucky if he stopped at all when he crossed that narrow opening.