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AIR BELLOWS GAP - The fog hangs to the ground as the sun comes up over a ridge 20 miles in the distance. Smokes curls up from rooftop chimneys visible just above the mist, and church steeples dot the landscape below.

Not a sound is heard above the wind that blows uphill from the valley. All is silent, and I have no idea where I am.

Deer season is a week old, and somewhere out there below us is the largest buck in North Carolina. We're sitting on a cliff, a big rock really, looking out over an expanse of mountain country somewhere near Alleghany County. Or maybe Ashe County. Or maybe Virginia. We're layered in clothes, camouflage and blaze, with maps and binoculars and knives and beef jerky.

Neither of us has a gun.

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A friend of mine called me a few years back and asked me to go hunting with him sometime. It was in the middle of summer, and I hadn't been hunting in several years anyway, so it was easy to say, "Sure, just call me," and not worry too much about it.

I'd grown up with friends who hunted and owned guns and planned extensive trips to the mountains and down East and to hunting grounds across the Southeast, and I'd been on a lot of them. But years ago I decided not to hunt anymore, not to keep guns in the house with two young daughters, not to follow that urge that's in Southern men and swells inside us each Thanksgiving when the wind begins to roll down from the western counties and the woodsmoke rises on the breeze and beckons us to head outdoors, not for football games or raking leaves but to follow that thing inside that calls us to arms, calls us to the hills.

Winter is coming. It's time to go hunting.

It's a primal urge, something undefined and easily ignored in a modern society of processed meat and packaged goods. But there was a time, right here in this state and not long ago, when many of us, most of us, still hunted for food.

The lines were already forming at the frozen-meats sections and turkey recipes were already being passed from mother to daughter a few weeks back (the modern Thanksgiving traditions) when the phone rang and a familiar voice from Caldwell County was on the other end.

"Let's go hunting," Caldwell said.

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The morning after Thanksgiving has dawned warm, and the thermals that push against the north face of the ridge hold the soupy fog to the ground below. The view is heavenly and more than a little disconcerting.

I'm leaning against the rock and training my glasses on a large, flat foggy bottom where a field of old corn and wild clover sits fallow. This is where the deer was last seen, his giant frame ambling up from a creek bed in early summer, majestic and unconcerned about a man standing on a rock a mile or more away.

"He's 275 pounds if he's an ounce," Caldwell says as I lower my glasses and look at him. "I swear."

In this state, like many others in the South, deer populations have risen dramatically in recent years to unheard-of levels, probably equal to the time when English settlers first came here in the 1500s and wrote in their journals of "bounteefl wildlife and abundnt food" running shoulder to shoulder through the eastern forests and coastal plains. All these years later, the deer populations have climbed along with the population of North Carolinians, causing odd fluxes in things like deer-car collisions and new hunting regulations and the relative size of the average deer.

The average deer in North Carolina doesn't approach 200 pounds. Anything larger is a rare find now and largely concentrated in places such as the Uwharries and in western pockets of undeveloped land like the one we're looking down on, shrouded in fog and woodsmoke. Somewhere down there is a giant deer, bigger than any I'd imagined here, bigger than any on record.

These rumors come up every now and then. There's one right now in Ashe County of a giant 15-pointer taken just last week and a rumor out of Alamance of a beautiful albino deer that mystically grazes the shores of the Haw River. No one has surfaced to verify either.

"This one's bigger than either of those," Caldwell says as I train my eyes back on the bottom and wait for the fog to clear.

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David Cobb, the division chief at the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, has heard all the stories. He's seen all the giant deer, all the record-setting racks and Boone & Crockett wonders to come out of every field and holler in North Carolina. When I told him about a possible 16-point typical, 275-pound buck somewhere in the mystical fields of Alleghany County, he paused.

"I've learned to never say never," he said. "But I've never seen a deer like that in this state. I've never seen a 275-pound deer from North Carolina. I don't know that I've ever heard of one."

It's believed that in the late 1800s, the deer population in North Carolina had been reduced to almost zero. The few that survived the century of unregulated hunting and disease lived in the thicket and pocosin of eastern North Carolina. As recently as the 1950s it's believed the only healthy deer populations in the western part of the state were on the protected grounds of the Biltmore Estate near Asheville.

Once the state began introducing deer on national park land, the population grew exponentially, and what we now recognize as hunting seasons were enacted to begin a systemic controlling of the herds using hunters as game managers. The average buck has a life span now of about four years. For a whitetail to grow to more than 250 pounds in western North Carolina, it would probably take 10 to 15 years.

"The only way he gets that big is if he's really old," Cobb said. "And the only way he gets to be that old is to stay out of sight. It would be extremely rare to see a deer like that."

Cobb had heard tales of giant deer before and seemed intrigued by the possibility. He suggested baiting a spot, setting up a motion-activated camera, possibly with night vision, then hoping against hope that the giant buck would move in to eat the bait and be captured on camera.

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Caldwell is smiling as he recounts the story of when he first saw the buck we're seeking. He was in this exact spot looking down on this exact meadow. It was late spring in early evening, just after the velvet begins to fall from the antlers.

"I'd seen the markings for quite some time and heard tales of this buck," he says, his breath condensing into fog as he speaks. "I walked all through these hills looking for tracks and signs. I saw rubs. I smelled the scrapes. I knew they were fresh. I saw the digs where his hooves dragged open the ground."

Caldwell is in his 60s now, and he has hunted deer in western North Carolina his entire life. He said his first kill was marked by the blood of the deer.

"The Cherokee said if you reached the downed buck just as it died, you would cover its mouth with yours and take its last breath," he says.

His voice trails off.

"Look," he whispers.

The fog has begun to lift over the meadow below. The first signs of underbrush begin to show, a creekbank becoming visible only by its route still shrouded in thick fog.

"That's where he lives," Caldwell whispers, even though we're a mile from the far side of the meadow and far from earshot of anything below us.

I shift to get a better view of the awesome display of nature revealing herself in early morning, the gauze of mist melting away to expose a breathtaking scene. Like something from the 1800s, a land that time forgot coming to light as I wipe my binoculars clean over and over in the cold elevation. My heart is pounding, my ears ringing, my eyes watering. All I see is the stillness. I don't notice that Caldwell has stood, moving behind me and pointing to a giant oak tree at the creekbend.

"Right there," he says.

My heart is about to explode.

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The whitetail deer is flourishing again in North Carolina. The population is believed to be more than 1.2 million strong in the state and up to 30 million nationwide. Hunters in North Carolina harvested more than 260,000 in 2007.

Not one of them approached the size of deer Caldwell says he saw back in summer, the one we spent three days tracking, the one we stood on a ridge in the middle of a November morning and looked for as fog lifted below us to unveil a spectacular scene.

We drop down from the Blue Ridge Parkway onto a craggy dirt road and drive straight down for what seems like forever, finally parking the old truck in a holler off the road and hiking for miles into a habitat few men ever get to see anymore.

This is the perfect place for hunting.

The modern way would've been to bait the deer, then take it with a high-powered rifle fitted with a modern scope and armed with specially prepared bullets. Caldwell said there is no honor in that. Not for this mystical beast. The honor, he said, would come in the hunt itself, not the kill.

He said the great animals that still roam our mountains deserve their own place in time, their own peace in their own habitat.

There are still places like that in North Carolina. Despite the population crush that threatens to push the center of our state into the pocosin swamps down East and into the dark folds of land to the west, there are still places here that man never sees, places he simply can't get to.

We stood on that ridge all day. We never saw the great animal.

Presumably, he's out there still.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com