Pennsylvania Game News - July 2021 - 21

neath me. I was stunned to suddenly
see the deer there and fumbled the shot.
The buck ran only a short distance and
stopped, but didn't offer a second shot.
I did, however, get a good look at its
certainly unique headgear.
Fast forward to the first Friday of buck
season. I was sick - cough, cough - from
school, hunting in the morning with my
dad and some friends. We made a few
drives without luck.
The group parted ways around noon,
so I decided to hunt where I had missed
the buck with the bow. Not five minutes
into that hunt, I spotted two deer in some
small pines. The second was a buck.
It wasn't until I found the deer at the
end of an easy-to-follow blood trail that I
realized I'd gotten a second chance at that
unique buck I'd missed in bow season - a
6-pointer with a fork on one side and a
cluster of four points on the other.
The following gun season found me
sitting on stand in a creek bottom along
the edge of pine thicket. It was raining and
cold, but I had to be out there.
After several quiet hours, I decided to
walk to my cousin's stand to see how he
was doing, but he must've felt the same
way because we met about halfway
between our stands.
While deciding what to do next, we
heard a buck grunt. The next thing we
knew, there were two does running past,
followed by a parade of five bucks. One
of the does apparently was in heat and had
attracted a following.
Since this was in the days before antler
The weird-racked 7-point the author shot
in 2019, left, was the latest in a long line
of odd-antlered bucks he's taken over the
years. Each comes with an equally unique
story, too. The odd 6-point preserved as a
skull mount was partially eaten by a bear
before the author could recover it.
JULY 2021
restrictions, we each picked a buck and
shot. Bubba took a large forkhorn. Mine
turned out to be another unique rack: it
had as many as seven points, depending
upon how picky you want to get in counting.
One antler grew over and behind the
second, across the top of the deer's head.
A few years ago I was bowhunting in
late October along the edge of a clearcut
in Rothrock State Forest, overlooking
Raystown Lake. There was plenty of buck
sign in the area, and I hoped an incoming
cold front would have bucks on the move.
Early in the afternoon, I heard deer
hoofs on the crisp leaves, then glimpsed
antlers as a buck made its way out of the
thicket.
The buck rubbed its antlers against a
sapling, then walked across the area in
front of me, where I shot.
I found plenty of blood, but I still
thought I'd hit the buck farther back
than I wanted, and I opted to back out
and return in the morning. The forecast
predicted a cold night that left no worries
about spoilage.
It was a short track job the next morning,
thanks in large part to a bear that
found the buck before me. There wasn't
much left of the carcass, but the headgear
- a neat-looking rack with four points on
one side and just two on the other - made
for another unusual keepsake.
Looking over my collection of Penn's
Woods whitetail racks, it's not hard to
notice most have some sort of weirdness
about them.
Only a few match on both sides. Most
lack balance, either in point count, length
of beam, or some other unique trait.
I'm OK with that, though, because
I'm pretty sure no one else has a collection
exactly like mine. And I plan to keep
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