Pennsylvania Game News - November 2014 - 5

Weatherby - as he had done hundreds
of times in twice-weekly sessions leading up to the elk season - but the bullet
missed low.
"I'm still flabbergasted I missed him,"
Leon said recently, "because I practiced
and practiced and practiced and practiced before going out there. I spent a
fortune on shells."
But the hours spent at the shooting
bench would pay off yet. The bullet from
Leon's follow-up shot struck directly
behind the elk's shoulder.
Leon pointed out the bullet hole
months later after digging the elk hide's
- caped head, hooves and all - from the
bottom of a cardboard box at Whispering
Winds Taxidermy, his wife Dianna's business of 11 years. When you're married to
a taxidermist, a full-body mount is the
only way to go in preserving the trophy
of a lifetime.
Sitting at a folding table and putting
some finishing touches on a coyote-skin
rug, Dianna said fashioning the hide and
horns into a mount of a bedded bull will
take "a couple days of both of us sewing."
Leon helps out regularly at the shop and,
as you might expect, skinned the elk himself, as well as two others taken by hunters
he boarded alongside at the lodge.
Leon's bull sported an 8- by- 6 rack that
green scored a gross of 351 3/8 inches, but
he'll never know for sure just how big the
bull was. With the hide off and elk quartered for processing, staff at the check station could only estimate the bull weighed
somewhere between 600 and 800 pounds.
Leon, who has hunted his entire life
but never outside of Pennsylvania, said
the experience holds special sentimental
value just for the fact it was a product of
the Keystone State.
"You can go out west and shoot an elk,
but this means a lot to me," he said. "Just
NOVEMBER 2014

to draw the tag is a super-amazing thing."
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The week after his elk harvest and
his return back home from points northwest, Leon had a truly remarkable day of
hunting.
"There's no fascinating story about the
buck," he said matter-of-factly.
Hunting a scrape line on State Game
Lands 75 the morning of Nov. 15, Leon
placed a crossbow bolt behind the shoulder of a 7-point that worked its way to
his stand.
Rather than dragging the deer from
the spot where it fell, Leon decided to
go back home and get a cart to make the
job easier. When he arrived back where
he parked - a family hunting camp that
abuts the game lands - he took a seat on
the cabin's front porch to rest briefly and
savor the moment.
In the field, 300 yards in front of him,
was a flock of about 18 turkeys.
"And here I am with my crossbow and
no gun," he said.
The turkeys were gone when he returned to the field with the cart. After
taking the buck back home and hanging
it in the shed, Leon ate lunch and decided
he'd go back and try to find those turkeys.
With his elk and buck tags already
filled, he left, smugly telling Dianna, "I'm
going to take my gun and go down and
shoot a turkey." He was joking, of course.
The field still was absent of turkeys when Leon showed up with his
12-gauge, but there were a few spots
he wanted to check. Sometime around
3:30, he heard a turkey and began calling. His calls resulted in no sighting, but
from the sounds that followed he could
tell there was a flock on the move ahead
of him, somewhere out of sight.
Eventually he was able to cut them
off. And of the seven birds that came to
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Pennsylvania Game News - November 2014

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