Pennsylvania Game News - June 2022 - 19

T WAS EVERY deer hunter's dream
come true. The monarch buck bolting
up the sidehill through the thicket suddenly
slowed and stopped. He raised his
nose high, looking right at me, the sweep
of his enormous antlers tilted back. I studied
him for a few moments then lowered
my rifle.
I
Only moments before, I had fired at an
8-point buck milling about at the edge of a
tram road among a group of other nervous
deer. It was the only buck of several - the
monarch among them - that offered a
clean shot. I'd lost sight of the 8-point
for a split-second when all the deer took
off, and thought for a moment that he'd
bolted uphill with the others. But I felt
good about my shot. I had to go down and
check. There, 70 yards out, one of the biggest
living bucks I had ever seen continued
to stand, then laying his ears back along
the great beams, he looked uphill back
at me and melted into the grape tangles.
Gone forever.
What I discovered was that my shot
was good, and the 8-point had crumpled
straight down, as if dropping through a
trap door in a magic act, falling off the
edge of the tram road into a depression,
but with enough life left to flip its tail
several times.
The 8-point sported a tall rack and a
double throat patch, and I immediately
recognized it as the same buck I had seen
two weeks earlier, when the buck gave
me the slip just as I was about to loose an
arrow on the last day of the bow season.
My wish to have another chance at this
buck now had come true. And if I had
not followed up on my shot, I might have
committed the egregious act of killing the
monarch buck based on an assumption.
S
OME MAY BE wondering how big
that monarch buck was. I can say with
confidence he'd have scored in the vicinity
of 150 Boone & Crockett inches. How do
I know this? For several years much of my
work centered around record book whitetails.
An ever-changing array of historic
super bucks destined for museum exhibits
passed through my studio and offices out
west, and I gained an eye for estimating
antler dimensions.
Additionally, as an illustrator for more
than 40 years, I've drawn countless antlers,
both great and small, and at every
stage of their development. One of the
more memorable assignments was the
170-inch Boone & Crockett typical I
painted for the December 2006 cover of
Game News. That buck, which was struck
by a vehicle and killed in Pennsylvania, is
pictured here again, but with an autumn
background. The 170-inch buck was
selected as the model to illustrate what
a buck that scores the B&C minimum
looks like.
The two B&C scores previously mentioned
are a familiar example of antlerspeak.
Had I used those numbers even 25
years ago, most hunters would not have
been able to visualize their size. Today,
however, the numbers register with more
people, due in great part to the emphasis
put on big antlers by the ever-growing
JUNE 2022
19
Pennsylvania Game News - June 2022

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