Pennsylvania Game News - February 2013 - 15

where he exited. Ray and I wondered what the guy’s problem was. Could it be he had no valid deer tags or no license at all? Was there something about his ﬁrearm? All we could do was wait and see. Finally, the remaining hunters who chose not to break back up over the hill arrived at our location. Ray and I got out and made friendly conversation about the day, the weather and their hunt, all while we checked everyones’ licenses and identiﬁcation. When I checked the one particular hunter’s license I noticed his antlered deer tag was missing and he had no antlerless deer license in his holder. “It looks like you had a successful season,” I said. He told us that he was just helping out his buddies drive deer and, in fact, he did have a valid muzzleloader stamp attached to his back tag. Again I made a mental note of his name and license number. Everyone then jumped in their vehicles and started heading out. Ray took note and jotted down the vehicle license number from the truck our suspect was driving. As everyone pulled away Ray decided we would drive to the top of the hill to see who had walked back to their vehicles from the deer drive. Everyone was gone, though. We drove back down to the dirt township road where we had been sitting but continued farther down the road directly below the large woodlot. We were anxious to head into the woods to see if we could ﬁnd the guy’s riﬂe. Ray and I climbed the steep hillside to look around. When we neared the top corner where we had last seen the hunter in question exit, Ray looked for some kind of a marker, maybe a rock or a stick the hunter may have left as a landmark. I started zigzagging my way up toward the open ﬁeld when I came upon a large decaying log. Sure enough, there lay the ﬂintlock riﬂe. Ray came down and surveyed the area. He took a few photos of the gun just as we found it. Ray carefully picked up the ﬂintlock riﬂe and we noted that there was powder in the ﬂash pan. We brieﬂy discussed the next course of
FEBRUARY 2013

action. We could either stake out the area, which could take hours and it would be difﬁcult to hide our vehicle, or we could take the gun and leave a business card by the log. We decided to take the ﬁrearm and Ray tagged it with an evidence tag. We documented everything that had occurred, along with the suspect’s information that we recalled from our license check. Ray called the region ofﬁce to run the vehicle information, which came back to our person of interest. Ray and I continued patrolling into the evening, wondering when the rest of this story was going to unfold. It was near dark when Ray drove me back to my car. In parting I asked Ray to keep me posted, as I was quite interested in how this case was going to play out. The following Monday morning I was at my desk at the Northeast Region Office when Ray called to tell me that he had just gotten off the phone with our suspect. Ray said the ﬁrst words out of the guy’s mouth were, “What’s it going to cost me to get my gun back?” Ray implied that the guy was pretty straight forward and admitted to him that he had already killed a buck earlier in the season, and was in fact trying to kill another deer unlawfully. The guy ended up pleading guilty to at least two charges and his ﬁrearm was returned. Through the years I can think of many circumstances where a hunter in an unlawful situation would go to great lengths to deceive us, as if they were playing charades. I’ve told many a coworker over the course of my career that if only some of these people could see themselves through our eyes and how foolish they are acting just to cheat the system or to take advantage of our natural resources. I think WCO Lizzio and I did a pretty good job of playing the game ourselves that day.
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Pennsylvania Game News - February 2013

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