Pennsylvania Game News - May 2011 - 32

turn uphill when they came to one of the ravines or stone wall fence lines. Upon reaching the first ravine and seeing that there were no tracks leading uphill, I followed the ravine downhill and into the woods until I found the tracks. Standing on one side of the ravine, I could see where the deer had crossed to the other side to continue their downstream course parallel to Mallory Run. Again, I left the deer tracks and went back into the field a hundred feet or so to parallel the deer tracks to the next stone wall. If there is one thing I learned while hunting with the flintlock, it is to always start the season with a new flint, and to always maintain a fresh charge of powder in the pan. To not do this is to invite a “flash in the pan” at the critical moment. I know because I have done it. I may have gone overboard a bit in maintaining a fresh charge of powder in the pan and cleaning the flash hole, but in my mind I knew that on this day I was going to face that critical moment and I wanted to be prepared. I knew there were two more fields ahead of me to cross, another stone wall and then a deep ravine. At the stone wall or at the ravine, I expected the deer to do one of three things: follow the stone wall or ravine uphill and across Bradley Road into other broad fields and heavy timber; turn downhill across Mallory Run and back to Paul Stevens’ Woods; or continue straight ahead, giving me an opportunity to get ahead of them and make a shot. The latter option was the one they chose, and when I saw that their tracks crossed the ravine to continue on the far side, I quickened my pace, following the ravine uphill a short distance to a narrow dirt
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road marked on the township maps as Bradley Road. Here, I followed Bradley Road for a third of a mile, entering the woods where they narrowed considerably between the road and the creek. If the deer kept coming along the course they had been traveling, and if I was ahead of them as I hoped, they would soon be working through this narrow neck of woods. As I stood there beside a large hemlock, I changed the powder in the pan and made certain of a clean flash hole one final time. Just as I finished I got a glimpse of movement among the heavy hemlocks. The deer were coming along a narrow path that skirted the top of a cliff, and it appeared they were going to head downhill into Mallory Run. I was not going to get a shot. They were too far away. Hunting is flooded with events of happenstance. No sooner had I resigned myself that I would not get a shot, than I heard a shot from the depths of Mallory Run. For an instant the deer stopped, then reversed their direction and started uphill on a course that would cross in front of me 40 or 50 yards away. The first two deer crossed a small clearing in front of me. The third one, for just the briefest of moments stopped, partly in the clearing, to look, listen and to smell the air. In that briefest of moments the flint was at full cock, the trigger set, the bead nestled into the “U” notch of the rear sight and both aligned with the chest area directly over the foreleg. I touched the trigger and in an instant of flash and smoke the round ball was on its way. This is exactly the way it happened on the last day of the flintlock season, January 12, 1991. It was the last deer I was to ever take with the flintlock, the last deer I was to ever track. If I could go back and repeat any one day of deer hunting between December 1, 1939 and December 15, 1993, it would be that last day of the flintlock season in 1991. It’s one I’ll never forget. 
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Pennsylvania Game News - May 2011

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