This story, “The Giant of Newcomer Hollow,” appeared in the February 1966 issue of Outdoor Life.
THE FIRST RAYS of daylight were beginning to reveal the dark outline of the eastern ridge as I pulled my car into the field at the head of New comer Hollow. My dad, my brother Bud, and I had been hoping for a good tracking snow, but the starry sky promised a clear, crisp day. It was December 3, the second day of the 1957 deer season.
Newcomer Hollow lies among a succession of sharp ridges a mile south of my home in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. It runs three miles northwest and opens into the valley of Dunning Creek. Beyond the valley, the landscape is dominated by the long ridge line of Dutch Corner Mountain. This area has always been prime deer country. Hemmed in by Burnt Ridge on the south and Oak Ridge on the north, it was once a great forest of red oak, hickory, jack pine, maple, and ash. But it had been timbered the year before and was now fairly open country.
I’ve hunted the hollow regularly during archery and rifle seasons since 1952. That was the year my wife Betty and I and our two children, Jeff and Jackie, moved into our present home seven miles west of the town of Bedford and three miles southeast of Shawnee State Park.
My dad, Dick Miller, works at a service station on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Bud at that time was a dispatcher for Eastern Express Company in Bedford; he has since been transferred to Terre Haute, Indiana. Another brother, Carl, is a carpenter. I work for Eastern Express as a yardman, hitching trucks and trailers.
I’m 36 and have hunted with Bud, 37, and Carl, 32, almost from the time we began walking. Over the years, a competition developed between us to see who would bag the biggest buck. Though I would usually get a deer each year, either Bud or Carl would always manage to edge me out with a bigger rack. In 1954, for example, when I shot a five-pointer, Carl dragged in a seven-pointer from Ritchie Hollow. Another year, I shot a six-pointer, but Bud got a six-pointer with a larger rack. Just the previous afternoon, on opening day, I had helped Carl drag out a beautiful eight-point buck with an 18-inch spread that would be tough to beat.
“You guys are a jinx,” I told Bud that morning as I loaded 130-grain Bronze Points into my .270 Remington Model 721. “But one of these days, I’m going to get a buck like you’ve never seen before.”
If I had known then how the day was going to end, I’d probably have come down with buck fever, and things might have turned out differently. As it was, I nearly muffed my chance at the best typical whitetail ever taken in Pennsylvania.
Bud and I left dad on a lookout near the head of the hollow. Deer usually feed on the flats at night and drop down into the hollow at daybreak to bed down. Dad’s stand gave him a spectacular view of the entire head of the hollow, including the trails leading off the flats. Bud and I hiked down into the hollow to a sawdust pile near the junction of two well-used deer trails. This wasn’t far from the spot where Carl had shot his eight-pointer the day before.
Daylight was coming on fast as I left Bud at the sawdust pile and hurried across to a smaller hollow that branches in from the north. After climbing halfway up the hillside, I found an old oak tree that the lumber men had left standing. It was leaning at such an angle that I was able to crawl up the trunk to the first fork of the tree.
As I sat there I thought back on the events of opening day. I had been all keyed up for it. Carl and I had reached the hollow just before day break. After we’d separated, I picked a stand on a tall stump. Deer started coming through my area almost im mediately, but all were does. They came singly and in twos and threes. Once, several hundred yards away, I saw a deer that appeared to be carrying a small rack, but I couldn’t be sure. My .270 is equipped with open leaf sights, which I like because they enable me to get on a deer quickly in thickly wooded country such as the hollow had been be fore it was cut over. On that occasion, though, I found myself wishing for a scope.
From time to time that day, I heard the cracks of high-powered rifles in the distance. Most of the shooting was coming from Pensyl Hollow, which is just on the opposite side of the flats from Newcomer. One barrage of about a dozen shots sounded like a small war. “Doggone it,” I said to myself. “This would be just the morning the bucks leave the flats and drop into the wrong hollow.”
At 2 p.m., I left the stump and was starting to hike up to Burnt Ridge when two shots rang out below me. The second one was muffled, the way a rifle sounds when a hunter delivers a finishing shot at short range. I walked down and found Carl, knife in hand, straddling an eight-point buck.
“He came trotting past with two does,” he grinned. “I would have waited for a bigger one, but I didn’t want to make it too tough on you.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “After you drag that deer out of here by yourself, you’ll be twice as glad you didn’t wait for a bigger one.”
I was kidding, of course. After help ing Carl finish cleaning the deer, we each grabbed an antler and began dragging it uphill to the head of the hollow. It was late afternoon by the time we got to the car. We heard no more shooting, and it seemed that most of the other hunters had left the woods. With no one to move the deer, there was little chance I’d get a shot. But I had the whole week off as part of my vacation, and tomorrow would be another day.
That evening, we learned that the barrage we’d heard in Pensyl Hollow had been two of my neighbors, Paul and Dale Feathers, cutting loose at an immense buck hightailing it across a clearing. I’ve heard a lot of stories about big bucks in our area, but I’d never seen a rack that was much to brag about. In the low-lying farm land, you might run into a corn-fed buck sporting a big, wide rack. But in the mountains, our deer average 110 to 115 pounds, and antler development is rarely exceptional. One reason for this is that the abundance of deer in the mountainous areas draws a lot of hunting pressure.
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Most bucks are killed the first season they carry legal size horns, and their chances of surviving enough seasons to grow a big rack are slim. Up to that time, Carl’s eight pointer with the 18-inch spread was the nicest rack from our hills I’d seen. Based on this experience, I might have suspected that the Feathers boys were exaggerating the size of the buck they had shot at-except for one thing. Earlier that year, during squirrel sea son, I’d met a hunter in Newcomer Hollow who told me about a buck he’d seen. Both his story and that of the Feathers brothers described a buck with a high-standing, perfectly symmetrical rack carrying about 10 points. “The tines looked like long, tapered candles,” the squirrel hunter had said. “If you see that buck, you’ll never mistake it for any other.”
WAS THERE REALLY a deer sporting a candelabra rack in the hills? After being beaten out for so many years by Bud and Carl, I was ready to believe anything. And if such a buck existed, I figured I had as good a chance as anybody of meeting up with him. Better, maybe, since I know that country like the back of my hand.
Now it was the second day of deer season, and I was perched in the forks of the leaning oak tree waiting for my chance. By 10 a.m., I’d seen nothing but does, and the dream began to fade. The sun was high in a cloudless sky, and there was no more shooting. Discouraged, I climbed down from the tree, stretched my legs, and walked back to the sawdust pile. Dad was sitting there with Bud.
“I saw a lot of does,” dad reported, “and one deer that might have been carrying a small rack. It was so far away I couldn’t tell. Besides, I couldn’t have hit anything at that distance.” “That may have been the same one I saw,” I replied. “How about you, Bud?”
“I must have seen a dozen does,” he said. “I guess the bucks were pretty well thinned out yesterday.”
As we sat on the sawdust pile munching peanut-butter crackers and sipping hot coffee, we noticed how quiet it had become. Even the gray squirrels had stopped moving around. “If there are any deer around,” I said, “they’ll be bedded down by now. Guess it’ll be up to us to stir things up. Suppose you wait here while I mosey down the hollow and hike back toward you along Burnt Ridge. Maybe I can move some deer your way.”
Pennsylvania’s top nontypical rack was taken in 1951 by the late Ralph Landis
I started down the hollow. The ground had thawed after an overnight freeze, and I was able to walk quietly on the mossy tote road that runs the length of the hollow. Moving slowly, I checked between the windrows of cut tings on the slopes on both sides. After half a mile, I started angling toward a round-top knoll where a branching hollow joins the main valley. My plan was to go over the knoll, drop down the other side, cross the branching hollow, and hike up the next slope to Burnt Ridge.
As I left the road and started up the hillside, a deer bolted from behind a brushpile about 85 yards uphill and to my left. Antlers flashing in the bright sunlight, he was really burning ground, running broadside and at a slight angle to me as he barreled toward the knoll. Thankful now for the open sights, which enabled me to get on him instantly, I held for the front shoulder and squeezed, but I knew instinctively that I hadn’t led him enough. He went crashing down, got up immediately, and kept going.
I slammed a fresh shell into the chamber and swung past the shoulder, allowing the lead I should have given him the first time. But I forgot that my first shot had slowed the buck, and the bullet plowed into the leaves ahead of him. As I worked the bolt for an other shot, he went over the knoll and out of sight.
My first impulse was to go up find the blood trail. Then it occurred to me that if I held my position, I still had a chance to redeem my poor shooting. If the de-er continued across the branching hollow, he’d come in sight again above the knoll as he climbed the next mountain. If he angled down the hollow, he’d reenter the main valley, and I might get an other crack at him.
After what seemed like an eternity, I saw him between the windrows on the far mountainside. He was about 250 yards away and moving up to ward Burnt Ridge. Even though he was traveling much slower now and was stumbling, there was time for only one more shot before he made it to the ridge. The .270 was zeroed in at 100 yards, but it throws a nice, flat trajectory, ideal for this kind of shooting. I held just over his left front shoulder and squeezed one off. The buck went down, kicked convulsively, slid back, and lay still. It was all over.
AFTER WAITING several minutes to make sure he didn’t get up, I called for dad and Bud. When they hollered back, I started over the knoll. It took me a good half an hour to scramble up that nearly vertical mountainside, but at last I found the buck, dead, among some scraggly jack pine.
While shooting at the deer, I knew only that he was carrying a legal rack and a good one. Everything had happened too fast to think of counting points. Now, as I came up to the deer, my eyes widened. He was thick-necked, and that rack was unbelievable. I had killed a massive ten-point buck, the biggest I’d ever seen! He was evidently an old-timer, judging from the gray around the face and shoulders, but was sleek and in prime condition. That squirrel hunter had been right the tines did look like long, tapered candles.
My first shot had taken him high in the left side — too high, thankfully, for a gut shot, but too low to break the spine. After entering, the bullet had angled down and back, breaking his right hip before exiting. My final shot had been true to the mark, entering just behind the left front leg and going through the lungs and out the far side. It was nearly an hour before dad and Bud joined me.
“Oh my gosh!” Bud said, pounding me on the back. “What’s Carl going to say when he sees this! He’s still bragging about his eight pointer.”
Dad took hold of the rack the deer’s head. “Boys,” he grinned, “it looks as if you’re going to have to find a new game to beat each other at. Ray has just ruined this one.”
We cleaned the deer and slid it down the slope to the tote road. From there we faced either a mile-long uphill drag to the head of the hollow where my car was parked, or a two-mile drag down to the main highway. We were debating which route to take when we heard gears meshing. It was Jim Beagle, the farmer who owns the land, driving in for a load of fence posts.
“Can I give you a lift?” he said in greeting. “Looks as if you got yourself a pretty nice … Wow! Where did you get THAT!”
We all laughed, and, after, another of backslapping, Jim helped us the buck into the back of his truck. Dad and Bud had estimated the deer’s weight at about 200 pounds. Jim has had plenty of experience weighing both cattle and deer, and he agreed. “Two hundred pounds and fat as butter,” he said. “Looks to be be tween six and eight years old.”
Back home, we put the tape measure on the rack. The spread was 23 inches at its widest point and 17 1/2 inches from tip to tip. That night, Bud, Carl, and I drove the buck into Bedford to show it off and attracted crowds everywhere we went. Gail Williams, a deputy game protector, said it was the biggest rack he’d ever seen. Before the night was over, we were offered enough drinks to stock a small tavern. Fortunately, I’m not a drinking man, or I might never have survived.
WHILE SKINNING the deer the next day, we concluded it must have been born in a field of four-leaf clovers. It had been shot three times in prior seasons. One bullet had gone through the brisket, leaving it noticeably torn. Another had gone through the right foreleg and the third through the left hind leg. The leg wounds had healed over.
Naturally, there was talk about hav ing the head mounted. But with Christmas coming on and presents to buy, I figured we had better uses for our money just then. My idea was to cut out the skull plate, with antlers attached, and have it mounted on a board, as I’d done with my other bucks. But Steve Lichvar, who runs the Shawnee Valley Sports Shop on U.S. Route 30, wouldn’t hear of it.
“Ray, let me pay to have it mounted,” he insisted. “Then you can lend it to me to display in the shop during hunt ing season. It’ll give my customers a rack to try and beat.” So, not too reluctantly, I took the head to Pat Farbo in Windber. He did a beautiful job.
Many deer-hunting stories end with the taking of a big buck. But not this one. In 1960, I entered the head in the state Recreation and Sportsmen’s Show, held in Harrisburg. It took the trophy for the finest Pennsylvania whitetail rack exhibited there. Even so, it never occurred to me that I had taken a record deer. It was a fine trophy, but I felt sure there had been bigger racks taken in Pennsylvania.
No official state records had ever been kept. There was no place a hunter could take his deer to be measured and recorded. Because of this, though Pennsylvania consistently ranks among the top deer states in the country, it has never had a reputation for producing many trophy bucks. The state Game Commission, together with the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association, felt that this was an unfair assumption and decided to do something about it.
Early in 1965, it was announced in the Game Commission’s monthly publication that a deer-records program was being started. Robert S. Waters, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, president of the Boone and Crockett Club, was assisting the Game Commission and the Outdoor Writers Association in setting it up. To get the program under way, a search was being con ducted for the biggest whitetail ever killed in Pennsylvania. Once the all time records were determined in the typical, nontypical, and archery divi sions, there would be a basis of com parison for future kills.
Nine Game Commission officers were instructed in the Boone and Crockett measuring system, measuring stations were set up at locations throughout the state, and the call went out for people to bring in their deer heads. Before it was over, more than 1,300 racks had been measured. Some of them dated back to the 1800’s.
Though I felt that my buck was far from a record, I figured it should place well up in the scoring. On June 15, 1965, Betty and I loaded the kids into the truck and took the head to the Game Commission’s southwest division headquarters in Ligonier. George Norris, chairman of the measuring committee, and his staff were busy measuring racks when we got there.
To get the rack through the door and into the office, I had to turn it side ways. I guess I made a bit of commotion, because everybody turned to look. When they saw the head, they just kept staring. “Mister, this is just for deer,” someone finally said. “You take that elk and get on out of here.”
After more good-natured kidding, the rack was measured. George Norris scored it at 177 5/8 points, the biggest to be checked in at the Ligonier headquarters. Still, there was no indication that it was any kind of state record. And it was well under the world record of 202 points, though it would have ranked 50th in the typical whitetail listing in the 1964 edition of the Boone and Crockett Club’s Records of North American Big Game.
Late in August, Betty and I received an invitation from the Game Commission to attend the first annual Pennsylvania Deer Record Banquet, to be held in Harrisburg on September 25, 1965. Our tickets were numbered seven and eight. “If the first-place winner got tickets Nos. 1 and 2,” Betty said, “that must mean that your head took fourth place.”
We went to the banquet prepared to receive a citation for the fourth-largest typical rack ever taken in Pennsylvania. It was quite an honor, and I felt proud to be representing Bedford County.
That night, when we looked at the heads displayed around the banquet room, it was easy to see why Pennsylvania felt slighted at being second-rated as a producer of trophy deer. I’ve never seen such a forest of antlers. After dinner, and following a talk by Dr. Elmer M. Rusten, chairman of the Records of North American Big Game Committee of the Boone and Crockett Club, they started calling the names of the winners.
The first place winner in the non typical class was a massive buck taken in 1951 by Ralph Landis, of Port Royal, Pa. It scored 207 7/8 points. In the archery division, Marlin E. Spangler, of Boswell, won with a 131 7/8-point rack bagged in 1962. The third-place rack among the typicals had been bagged all the way back in 1830! Finally, all the awards had been given out except one — the all-time record typical whitetail.
“Betty, there’s been a mistake,” I whispered. “Mine couldn’t be first.”
The next thing I knew, they were calling my name, and Lieutenant Governor Raymond Schafer was handing me the citation and bronze medallion. With all the flashbulbs popping and I newsmen crowding around me, I felt like a celebrity. It wasn’t until we were in the car and headed home to ward Bedford that Betty brought me down to earth. “Okay, big shot,” she said, leaning over to me and puckering her lips, “now give me your autograph.”
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Today, Pennsylvania’s record typical whitetail is on display in a place of honor in our living room. If you hap pen to drive past, drop in and Betty and I will be glad to show it to you. She might even remember to dust it off. But you’d better hurry, because I figure that this is one record that isn’t going to last too long. Somewhere in the mountains and hollows of Pennsylvania, there are bucks carrying even bigger racks, and it’s just a matter of time before one of them gets tagged. With my luck, it’ll probably be one of my brothers who comes traipsing in with it.”
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