This story, “The Double Hat Rack,” appeared in the December 1964 issue of Outdoor Life. While the McCullough buck was the No. 1 typical in Ohio at the time at 181 4/8 inches, today it is ranked 69th in the state. The Helser buck is not listed in the Boone & Crockett record books, though it is listed in the Buckeye Buck Club records at 190 1/8.
The 1963 deer season in Ohio ran for only two days, Thursday and Friday, December 12 and 13, and the regulations limited hunting from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. We didn’t find the track of the big buck until shortly after noon on Thursday. That meant we had just 12 hours to find and kill him.
The odds were all against us, but if the little we had heard and knew about this particular deer was true, it was worth a good, hard try. We took the track. A couple of hours later we jumped him. He was too far away for a shot, but we got the first look any of us had had at him. Then and there, if we had harbored any ideas about hunting any other deer, we forgot them. The hat-rack buck was everything we’d dreamed about. Now if we could just get the best of him in the limited time that remained!
I’m 31, work at the Kaiser Aluminum plant in Newark, Ohio, and live near the town of Glenford a few miles to the south. I grew up in that area and have hunted since I can remember, mostly coon. I first went after deer in 1959 and had what I guess you’d call beginner’s luck. That year I killed a good doe only a few miles from home, and another in 1960. Ohio had no deer season in 1961, but in December, 1962, I downed my third doe. By then I was convinced that deer hunting was the most exciting sport I had ever tried.
Up to 1962, I had never been much interested in trophy heads or in deliberately going after a big buck. Like many deer hunters, if I went home with venison I was satisfied. I felt that if I happened to collect a trophy someday, well and good. But I wasn’t going to put it at the top of my list. Then two things happened that changed my outlook.
First, I started to hear reports of an exceptional buck in the farming country around my home. My brother-in-law, Ken Turner, was the first to tell me about him. Ken lives not far from my place, and he saw the deer in the woods near his house in the fall of 1962. He doesn’t hunt, but this whitetail came close to giving him buck fever.
“I never saw anything like him,” Ken said. “He’s got a head like a hat rack!” Then he went on to tell me about the deer’s strange horns. Though they appeared to lack tines, they were as thick as a man’s wrists. From then on I thought of that deer as the hat-rack buck and itched to hunt him.
When tracking snow came, my hunting partners and I prowled the country until we found a huge track we assumed was his. He was with four other deer, and we started scheming up ways to outsmart him. But a week or two before the hunting season started, the whole band moved out to a new area, and during the season we couldn’t even find their tracks. I settled for a doe. Later we located the big buck and his bunch again, in a new hangout, but all we could do then was wait a year for another chance at him.
Meantime, something else happened that further fanned my interest in trophy hunting. That same December, a friend of mine, Arlee McCullough, who lives a few miles east of Newark and works at the Kaiser plant where I do, killed a buck in Licking County that had the biggest typical whitetail rack ever recorded in Ohio, and was the second-best taken anywhere in the country that year.
Arlee had an exciting time with that buster. As he tells the story, he was hunting with relatives and friends from the Newark area, a party of nine. The 1962 season, like that of 1963, lasted only two days. There was a foot of snow on the ground, and the party killed four deer the first day. Arlee wasn’t among the lucky ones. In fact, as he puts it, he had never been
what you would call a lucky deer hunter. He started hunting with his dad when he was 13, around Newaygo, Michigan, where the family lived then. He’s 27 now, has hunted every year since, in one of five states — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or West Virginia — but up to 1962 he hadn’t killed a deer. His luck changed that year, with a vengeance.
The first afternoon, he and two of his partners jumped four or five deer in a thick stand of evergreens and got a good look at them. There was an eight-point buck in the lot, and they took his track. About 3 o’clock, wet snow started to fall and made further tracking impossible. They quit hunting for the day, thinking the deer would hole up in a brushy valley ahead if he wasn’t pushed.
Next morning, on a stand at the head of that valley, McCullough had waited less than half an hour when he heard shooting on the far side of a ridge. Then he saw a big doe come bounding off the hill 300 yards away. He ran to head her off and heard movement in the brush ahead. Then two big deer and a small one came busting straight at him, spooked by other hunters.
They were running full tilt, their heads close to the ground. Arlee said later that if he hadn’t shot they’d have run over him. They were in thick brush, but he glimpsed horns on the one in the lead and cut loose. Only shotguns and slug loads are legal in Ohio, and he was using a 12 gauge Marlin pump-gun. The slug hit in the back of the neck, and he found out later that it traveled the full length of the deer and came out of a hindquarter. The buck didn’t fall or falter, but he threw his head up and Arlee got his first look at a tremendous rack, almost in his lap.
“My first thought was that this sure wasn’t the eight-pointer we had tracked the day before,” he recalls. The deer turned sideways, still running full speed. Two jumps took him into an open spot, and Arlee’s second shot caught him there in the middle of a leap. Arlee heard the slug hit and saw blood spurt down a shoulder. The buck stumbled and went to his knees, but floundered up and ran again.
The next shot was also a shoulder hit, a few inches back of the other. Again the buck’s front legs gave way and he fell. But he got up again. McCullough’s final shot, fired as the deer ran straight away, broke a hip. The buck managed to stagger another 30 to 40 yards, crashed down, and was dead when Arlee got to him.
Of the two deer that had first appeared with the big buck, one had disappeared. The other, a doe, was still nearby, and one of Arlee’s partners nailed her after the big buck fell.
Arlee’s buck weighed 220 pounds field dressed and carried a beautiful rack, symmetrical and heavy, with six long tines on each side plus a short brow point. Entered in the Buckeye Big Buck Club competition, sponsored by Ohio’s Wildlife Division, it scored 186 2/8 and took top honors as the best typical whitetail ever recorded in the state. In the Boone and Crockett Club competition held at Pittsburgh in April, 1964, the rack’s official score dropped to 181 4/8. But the head was still good enough to finish in second place in the competition, 10 1/8 points behind the top typical whitetail, killed in Montana by Earl McMaster. This was the buck that scored 191 5/8 and was described in “How I Shot the No. 1 Deer” in OUTDOOR LIFE last month.
When I saw McCullough’s trophy I changed all my ideas about deer hunting. If there were bucks that big in Licking County, I reasoned, there had to be others about as good in Perry, which adjoins Licking on the south and is where I do my hunting. I wanted one, and I had a hunch the hat-rack buck would fill the bill. I made up my mind that when December rolled around again I’d do everything I could to hang his head on my wall.
I figured I’d have a chance to get a good rack sometime, though, because Ohio has more than its share of big bucks. It’s not one of the big deer states. The herd numbers only around 25,000 and the yearly kill runs from 2,000 to 3,000, compared with 65,000 to 125,000 each year in such states as Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. I’ve looked up some figures on Ohio deer. I got a lot of them through the Buckeye Big Buck Club founded by Merrill Gilfillan, editor of the Ohio Conservation Bulletin. Gilfillan says that in the six years since he started the club, 141 eligible bucks have been shot. You can’t get into that club unless you’ve shot a typical whitetail head with a score of 140 or a nontypical head with at least 160. That’s a good rack by any standards, and it’s a lot of big deer for a state with a small herd. Last year, 33 bucks were recorded, the best showing for one year in the club’s history. Several Ohio heads have also made the Boone and Crockett Club’s trophy lists.
I’m told Ohio has a lot of big deer for several reasons. First, we have a lot of cornfields and there’s plenty of other good fodder. There’s also supposed to be a good combination of minerals that helps our deer grow big racks. We also have the “any deer” rule, so does are taken too and the range doesn’t get crowded.
By the fall of 1963, my hunting partners and I had talked and speculated enough about the hat-rack buck so that they wanted him about as bad as I did. We spent a lot of time discussing ways and means of doing him in.
We didn’t say much about our plans to anybody. But as the time went by, every now and then somebody caught a glimpse of a whitetail with enormous horns, and the word got around. By the time hunting season arrived, it was plain we’d have competition, but by then we had done everything we could to tip the odds in our favor.
The big buck’s tracks were easy to identify, and we had put in plenty of time looking for them and trying to discover where the buck hung out, where he fed, and what travel routes he used.
Perry County is rough, hilly country and has farms in the valleys. The farmland is mixed with brush and timber, and some of it is abandoned and going back to weeds and woods. Although it’s only 50 miles from Columbus, it’s an ideal place to hunt. There is plenty of thick stuff where a deer can give you the slip, but there are enough roads to let a hunter get around without much trouble. There’s quite a lot of posted land and you have to know where you can hunt. As a result, the country’s not heavily hunted.
Judging from the tracks we found, we decided that our hat-rack buck was living in timber not far from Glenford. We found an untended cornfield, bounded by thick brush, that had gone unpicked two or three years before. There was still an ear or two hanging on the dry, weather-beaten stalks. We concluded the deer spent quite a bit of his time in and around that field.
A few days before the season opened, we picked up his track there. He was in company with a doe, and we followed his trail for three hours to find out where he’d go and what he’d do when the heat was on. When we went home that evening, we figured we were as ready for him as we’d ever be.
There were six in our hunting party, and by opening day all of us had our hearts set on one deer. Nobody wished the others any bad luck, but, at the same time, I guess each of us was secretly hoping to be the lucky one. Above all, we hoped that somebody in our party would kill him.
We were in the woods an hour after daylight on opening morning, ready for the 9 o’clock zero hour, Dick Bare, Eddie Folk, Rick Ridiski, Glen Hersey, John Campbell, and I. All of us live around Glenford and we hunt together a lot. Dick is a salesman for a plumbing supply firm, Eddie a plumber, Glen is school principal at Glenford, Rick a teacher there, and John is a farmer.
The morning was cold and windy, and there was about half a foot of snow on the ground, which made for good tracking. We covered a lot of country that forenoon without finding what we were looking for, but about an hour after noon we cut the track of the big buck not far from the field of unpicked corn. Our deer hunt got off the ground.
We split, two men following the track, the others circling ahead to take stands on likely crossing places. Most deer hunting in our part of Ohio is done that way, and it’s the method I have most confidence in.
The buck circled to the north and east, then turned south and crossed the road that runs east out of Glenford toward my place. His behavior showed he knew he was being followed. But he didn’t act worried about it. There were a lot of places he could go, and it was plain he intended to keep traveling as long as we stayed on his trail.
About midafternoon he stopped for a breather, and we jumped him in thick brush on the side of a ridge. Eddie Folk and I got a fairly good look at him as he raced uphill beyond range.
This is as good a time as any to point out that shotgunning for deer is not quite like hunting them with a rifle.
Over most of the country they’re regarded as the rifleman’s game, and I realize many hunters think a shotgun isn’t the right weapon for deer hunting. I can’t agree.
As in Ohio, a number of farming states that have growing deer herds limit hunting to shotguns for reasons of safety. Hunters make out all right in those states, and I believe they do as clean and effective a job of killing their deer as do hunters in country where only rifles may legally be used.
The four deer I have killed have been taken with a 12 gauge Browning automatic, using rifled slugs, and I couldn’t ask for better performance. I’ve never used buckshot, which is prohibited in Ohio, and wouldn’t like to. But the rifled slug is very good deer medicine. Some guns don’t handle slugs as well as others, and I’d advise any hunter to try them out in his gun before he starts hunting. In the right gun, they’re good at ranges up to around 100 yards (my Browning drops a slug only an inch or two at 80 yards), and few whitetails are killed beyond that. The heavy, slow-traveling slug gets through brush better than a high-velocity rifle bullet and arrives with plenty of knockdown and killing power. I argue that if a hunter gets a decent shot with a shot-gun within 100 yards and fails to take home venison, it’s his own fault.
Admittedly, the shotgun hunter has to pass up a long shot now and then, and in general he has to stalk closer than the rifleman. But that’s the best part of deer hunting.
We tracked the hat-rack buck between three and four miles that first afternoon without seeing him again. Shortly before the legal quitting hour, we followed him to the top of a high ridge. His track led down the opposite slope into thick brush and timber, and we decided to quit for the day. He was tired, and it seemed likely he’d stop there for the night if given the chance. More snow fell in the night, making tracking conditions ideal. We went back to the ridge and jumped the hat-rack buck less than a quarter mile from where we had left him.
The game of hide-and-seek started in earnest then, and this buck was expert, at it. Four of us, including me, moved ahead and took stands. Folk and Campbell followed his track. He slipped through our line, and Bare and I caught a glimpse of him as he went out of sight over the next ridge. I made a big circle and tried to head him off, but he cut around me without my even knowing when he went by. I took my turn on his track then, hoping either to get a crack at him or push him to one of my partners.
He came to corn stubble where sheep were pasturing, walked out into the field, and circled in and out among the sheep tracks. I lost him and had to go to the fence and walk around the border of the field until I found where he had gone out.
By that time, I had lost contact with my buddies and it seemed as if I had the deer all to myself. But I knew they weren’t far away. About an hour later, I found the buck’s track came to an abrupt end along a brushy fence.
He had me stumped for a few minutes, but when I looked things over more carefully I discovered he had turned around and back-tracked, stepping carefully in his own prints. I followed him back for about 300 yards to where he had made a tremendous jump to one side. He crossed a creek and lay down, but I put him out of his bed without seeing him.
That happened around noon, and it was plain the buck was getting tired. We had trailed him some six miles since the previous noon and he wanted to rest. On top of that, a deer tracked steadily in that fashion, with no letup, gets worried, and that takes a lot of starch out of him. It was beginning to look to me as if one of us might get this big fellow’s rack.
He was working farther and farther south, out of his home territory. That put him under an additional handicap. Bare and Folk came along and took over the job of tracking. It wasn’t long before Hersey got a crack at him, but the buck was almost 200 yards away and Glen missed. An hour after that Bare also got a shot, but again the range was too long for a rifled slug.
About 1:30 p.m., some 24 hours after we had started to trail him, and after eight miles of tracking, the buck walked out into a brushy pasture less than half a mile from my house and stopped. I had gone out to the road, meaning to get ahead of him and take a stand, and I saw him walk into the field and stop in a patch of briers and brush, looking around as if he were lost. I think that was exactly the case. A deer pushed out of his home range into unfamiliar territory gets as mixed up as a man in a strange city. We had driven this buck into country that was new to him, and he was no longer sure where to go.
I got a better look at him, and what I saw made me want him more than ever. He had the heaviest, most massive rack I had ever seen on a deer, and I saw that we were after a freak head, as Ken Turner had told me. I couldn’t make out the usual upright tines, and the rack didn’t look normal. If I could kill him, I told myself, I’d have the trophy of a lifetime.
He was headed up the ridge in very thick stuff, running like the wind, broadside to me, and I could get only glimpses of him — horns, flash of flag, a patch of brown through the brush.
I got around him and picked a stand along a fencerow at the foot of a hollow, where it seemed likely he’d come out of the field. And now I got help from a totally unexpected quarter. A neighbor of mine was pasturing two ponies in that field. They spotted the deer and went after him like furies, ears laid back, squealing and neighing. After all that had happened in the last 24 hours, that was too much for him. He lit out at a hard run, headed my way, with the two ponies right on his heels.
He distanced them just too far away for my shotgun to reach, still running toward me, and went out of sight in thick brush. I waited with my heart hammering against my ribs. If he kept coming, he was my deer.
I didn’t know it, but Dick Bare was on a stand above me, at the head of the hollow, and suddenly I heard him yell, “He’s going up the hill behind you!” Then I heard brush break and turned in time to see the buck go over the fence I was standing beside, long shotgun range away.
He was headed up the ridge in very thick stuff, running like the wind, broadside to me, and I could get only glimpses of him — horns, flash of flag, a patch of brown through the brush. I poured five slugs at him as fast as the Browning could get them off, and that’s very fast. I don’t know which one connected, for I couldn’t see him that well, but it was probably the last one. He went down and I started for him at a dead run. Before I could reach him he pulled himself up on his front legs, but my slug had broken his back about halfway between shoulders and hindquarters, and there was neither time nor need for a finishing shot. He was dead when I got to him.
I had made a very lucky shot and killed him at 130 yards. That’s not guesswork, either, for we paced it later, from where he fell to where my empty shells lay. I don’t rate shotgun slugs accurate at much beyond 100 yards, as I said earlier. But if you can get one in the right place, they still have ample killing power up to the distance at which I downed my buck. Luck was certainly with me.
I was a mighty excited deer hunter. Now that I had a chance to look him over close up, it was hard to believe I had killed such a deer. His rack was a freak, all right, but it was a magnificent freak. Dick came running downhill and took one look. “Hat rack,” he cried, “that’s a double hat rack!” He couldn’t have described those wonderful horns any better.
They do not sweep up and forward as antlers of a typical whitetail do. Instead they flare out from the sides of the head and then curve up, more like moose horns than deer. They are unusually heavy, eight inches around at the base, and the main beams are 22 and 24 inches long. The oddest thing about them is that each antler divides a few inches from the head into what looks like two main beams, almost as if the deer had grown a double rack.
On the left side, the secondary beam is just short of 14 inches long, on the right it is almost 23, close to an inch longer than the main beam itself. Those branch beams, forking off from the main ones, make the rack the strangest I have ever seen. Except for two eight-inch brow points growing straight up, the rack is short on tines. The right antler counts 10 points in all, the left only six.
The deer weighed 227 pounds field dressed, after he had hung overnight. Measured by Merrill Gilfillan, an official Boone and Crockett Club measurer, he went into the records of the Buckeye Big Buck Club with a score of 190 1/8. That’s down around 45th place on the Boone and Crockett list for nontypical whitetails. Hunters who have seen the massive head have expressed surprise that it did not score higher. The explanation lies in the small number of tines. Most nontypical racks are studded with points of varying length, and that helps to run the score up. The strange double beams of my deer have to be counted as a main beam and one tine on each side.
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But as this is written, at the end of the summer 1964, he is the best non-typical whitetail entered in the Buckeye Big Buck Club competition for the 1963 season. He’ll probably hold that place. On top of that, he was my first big deer, and as unusual a trophy as any hunter is likely ever to take. I earned him, and I wouldn’t ask to do better. That double hat rack of his is going to look mighty good on my wall for the rest of my life.
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