There’s not a hunting camp in the world where stories of the “big one that got away” don’t circulate. They even have names and many have become famous in their own right.

For example “Mossy Horns” was a huge whitetail deer buck that had hunters stumped for many years and eventually became so legendary that a hunting product company named one of their product lines in the animal’s honour.

Other names that circulate in hunting camps are “Ghost of the Forest,” “Swamp Monster” and “King of the Woods,” to name a few.

Other big elusive trophy animals are named after characteristics in their appearance such as the famous “Hole in the Horn Buck”, the largest whitetail buck on record.

While many of these stories are the fiction of imagination and part of hunting lore, there are just as many animals that really lived and have been seen many times by hunters but never close enough to be taken.

Most of these trophies have been found dead after they succumbed to a vehicle accident or died of natural causes.

The Boone & Crockett Club, the official trophy animal record keepers in North America, regularly update their records with trophy animals that have been found dead, and almost without exception these trophies are by many points larger than anything hunters have taken.

Why is it, you may ask, that the biggest trophy animals outsmart hunters?

Well, they don’t really outsmart hunters.

The reason why some game animals grow very old and big is because they lead a very withdrawn life; often these animals don’t even associate with their own kind other than during the breeding cycle and even then they are very cautious.

In human terms you could say that these animals went off the grid.

Scientists have studied at length why some animals behave in such a way but have yet to come up with a clear answer.

On May 22, 2015 the Vancouver Sun published a long article about a bighorn ram that was killed in a motor vehicle accident on Highway 940 west of Longview, Alberta. The person who found the unfortunate ram contacted the authorities for permission to keep its skull and horns.

The man also contacted the Boone & Crockett Club, asking them to measure the horns of the ram to see if that exceptional animal would make it for a trophy recording.

A team from the B&C club traveled from Missoula, Montana to Alberta.

The result of the measurements yielded 45 and 6/8 inches of the right horn and a full inch more on the left horn.

Not only did the horns qualify for entry in the trophy records, this was the largest set of horns ever recorded on any bighorn ram, making it the new world record for this species.

Hunters from all over the world are known to pay $40,000 or more to pursue a record trophy bighorn sheep.

However, as the Boone & Crockett records clearly show for almost all game species the real “Monsters of the Swamp,” “Mossy Horns” and “King of the Mountain” hardly ever die at the hands of a hunter.

With that said, the next time you hear a story about ‘the big one that got away’ don’t be too quick to dismiss it as a tall tale or figment of the imagination.

The real “monster trophies” are out there and every so often they grant us a glimpse of them just enough to tease us.