Bill Zee’s Boone & Crockett Club River Bull By Bob Bell Photos courtesy of Bill Zee VERY YEAR for a decade after Pennsylvania’s first modern elk season opened in 2001, Bill Zee had applied for an elk license. Licenses were awarded by lottery and he never got one. That wasn’t unusual. Some 20,000 other hunters regularly applied, so the odds against any specific individual being drawn were pretty high. But in 2011 Bill’s luck changed. He was one of only 18 applicants who received a license for a bull elk. Thirty-eight other hunters got licenses for antlerless elk. At first Zee was happy just to get a liNOVEMBER 2012 E cense. He was a hunter — he’d hunted deer and small game ever since he was a kid — and now there was a chance to get something far larger, maybe five times as big as the largest whitetail he’d ever killed — a bull elk. But even in his wildest dreams he never imagined that he would not only get one, but that it would be a tremendous nontypical bull. One that after the As many readers no doubt know, the author is the former Game News editor. 3