Pennsylvania Game News - August 2009 - 7

through the liver. The deer bolted and disappeared into the thick brush. With daylight failing, I descended from my stand, found my bloodied arrow and determined, from the blood on the ground, the escape route the deer had taken. Knowing the shot had hit farther back, I would give the animal ample time to expire before picking up the trail. I returned to my truck, made the short, 10-minute drive to my home, and phoned hunting buddies Mike Bazzano and Jeff Pannell, both of whom owed me a few tracking favors. With their help and that of Jeff’s young son, Chris, we recovered the buck about an hour and a half later. The help they provided also made the uphill drag back to my truck a less rigorous task. Number Eight I killed my most impressive 8-point (and my best buck ever, scoring just over 120 inches) on that same farm some eight years later, but under far different circumstances. It was the first Saturday of our 2004 regular firearms season and I was perched high in a treestand at the opposite, uphill side, of that same orchard/pasture. My pumpaction Remington 870 12-gauge was cradled in my lap. The slug gun was fitted with a rifled barrel and a 2-7x scope. Squinting through the dim haze of daybreak, I thought I noticed a deer feeding through the orchard at first light. I found the deer in my scope and, sure enough, there he was — a big ol’ wide-racked buck. I took a deep breath, braced the shotgun against the tree trunk and, with the buck broadside at about 75 yards, squeezed off the shot. I fully expected to see the buck sprawled on the ground dead or dying after the shot, but to my confused consternation, when I finally caught sight of him he was trotting away, unscathed, in the opposite direction. Fifteen seconds later a single shotgun blast resonated from just beyond the spot where the buck had disappeared from view. No one had to tell me what that meant. I sat AUGUST 2009 dumbfounded in the tree for two more uneventful hours until, disgusted with my awful luck and sorry marksmanship, I decided to call it a morning. But before I left, I searched the orchard where the buck had stood when I had shot. With no blood or hair to be found anywhere, it was obvious the shot had been a clean miss. At that point a pair of hunters, a father and his young son, appeared in the pasture about a hundred yards away. The elder hunter positioned his son beneath an apple tree and signaled to me, indicating that he was going to perform a one-man deer drive, circling back down into the brushy valley in hopes of pushing deer to his son. I waved back, checked my watch, and changed my game plan. It was just about 9 o’clock, and I figured I might as well head back to my stand and, with luck, possibly reap the inadvertent benefits of the other hunter’s efforts. I had no sooner settled back into my treestand when a noisy commotion echoed from deep within the thick grove of pines that bordered the orchard. The sound of crashing brush and branches was so loud I imagined it was caused by a hunter or hunters clumsily dragging a deer through the woods. I could barely believe my eyes when two bucks came crashing through the pines and stopped short when they reached the edge of the orchard. The second deer was a scrawny forkhorn, but the lead buck carried a breathtaking rack. He stood broadside about 35 yards away, his polished white antlers resplendent in the bright morning sunlight. I centered the crosshairs behind his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The deer’s body shuddered at the shot, but the buck charged forward, and then turned left, paralleling the orchard, and headed directly under my stand. I pumped my last slug into the 7

Pennsylvania Game News - August 2009

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