This story, “The Rack Was No Phantom,” appeared in the May 1968 issue of Outdoor Life.
WITH HIS ANTLERS FLASHING in the sun light, the buck bounded out of the hemlocks. I pulled the longbow to full draw as the deer ran broadside to me, 35 yards away, but a brush pile between us blocked any chance for a shot.
The deer broke into the clear for an instant as it leaped across the logging road. Then the buck was back into the brush again; but out of the corner of my eye I saw an opening ahead.
My lead and hold were instinctive; my entire consciousness focused on the deer. I released the bowstring, the arrow was on its way, and the buck was trotting toward the opening. I saw everything as if it were hap pening in slow motion. Then in one split instant the action seemed to blend together: the deer flashing through the opening, the arrow converging with it. Then — thunk!— the deer was gone, clattering down the hill side.
Suddenly I was weak in the knees and trembling all over. Had I scored or muffed the chance of a lifetime? I knew this was the biggest buck I’d ever seen. It was thick-necked, and its rack was tremendous. I guessed the buck was at least a 10-pointer, but I had no idea how big it really was.
It was Saturday, October 2, opening day of Pennsylvania’s 1965 four-week archery season on deer. I was hunting with Don Switzler. We’re both 20, live in Patton, Pa., and work for a contracting company as linemen on high-tension power lines.
Don and I had taken up bowhunting two years earlier, the same year that hunters began returning from the Long’s crossroad area with reports of a massive trophy buck. I first heard about this deer from Frank Urbain and Jim Blake, both of Patton. Local hunters began calling the deer the phantom because of the way it disappeared before they could get a shot at it.
Don and I have been hunting together for several years, first with rifle and — starting in 1963 — with bow and arrow. Don bought a semirecurve fiberglass bow, and I got an inexpensive longbow, also fiberglass. Don’s bow pulls 50 pounds; mine pulls 44 pounds. These bows might seem to be hefty weapons for beginners, but we’re both six feet tall and we both weigh 180 pounds. We saw plenty of deer those first two seasons, but we never caught so much as a glimpse of this phantom buck we kept hearing about. We even got a few shots at other deer but didn’t score.
In 1964 I got a shot at a doe running up a hillside 35 yards away. Pennsylvania allows bowhunters to shoot a buck or doe. My arrow hit this deer low in the rear leg. It was evidently a glancing hit because the arrow ricocheted and the doe kept going with no limp. Later that year, during the rifle season for antlerless deer, I bagged a 110-pound doe with my Winchester Model 94 .32 Special.
All of this hunting was done in the rolling hill country within a few miles of our homes in Patton, in Cambria County, approximately 15 miles northwest of Altoona. Cambria County’s annual deer kill of 1,600 puts it well down on the list of Pennsylvania’s leading deer counties.
Cambria doesn’t compare with Potter County, where hunters average 5,000 deer a season, or with Lycoming County, which usually produces 4,600 kills each year.
In several areas, though, Cambria County supports good-size deer herds. And our corn-fed farmland bucks sport bigger racks than those found in the heavily forested mountainous parts of the state. Pennsylvania’s record bow-killed buck taken up to 1965 came from adjoining Somerset County. This buck was an 11-pointer downed in 1962 by Marlin E. Spangler of Boswell. It scored 131 7/8 under the Official Scoring System of the Boone and Crockett Club.
Don and I did most of our hunting in timberland near Long’s crossroad, which adjoins Prince Gallitzin State Park, six miles northeast of Patton. That’s where I’d bagged my doe the year before, and we knew plenty of deer were in those woods. With luck we might even get a chance at this elusive phantom buck we’d been hearing about. Anyway, that’s where we’d agreed to open the 1965 archery season.
It had rained the night before opening day. The rain let up about midnight. When I picked Don up at 6 a.m., the starry sky promised a clear day. We drove to the state park, turned south at the Long farm, and bounced over the dirt road that runs the divide between Deemer Hollow and Killbuck Run.
Dawn was breaking when I pulled up beside the old logging road and parked. We got out and strung our bows. Promptly at 7, legal hunting time, we started down the logging road into the woods. This was the moment we’d been awaiting for a long time.
Everything looked fresh and green after the night’s rain. Droplets hung like diamonds from the branch tips of towering hemlocks. We walked quietly on rain-softened earth under the forest canopy of giant oak, beech, hemlock, maple, and hickory. At several places we paused to check fresh tracks where deer had crossed the logging road.
After we’d gone about 200 yards into the woods, Don nudged me.
“I’ll turn in here and find a stand,” he whispered. “You go on ahead and pick me up on your way out. If you need any help to drag out a deer, just give a call.”
I grinned and went ahead. If there was anything I hadn’t had to worry about when I went archery hunting, it was dragging out a deer.
Before long I came to a giant hemlock at a bend in the road. This was where I’d bagged the doe the year before. I turned off the road and walked to a stump near the junction of two well-used deer trails. There I sat to noiselessly watch the nearby deer trails. It was so quiet you could hear the needles drop off the jack pines. If there were any deer or other bowhunters mov ing in the woods, they were sure being quiet. I’d forgotten that the world could be so still.
After an hour of watching and waiting, I got a feeling that I’m sure must be familiar to many bowhunters — futility.
If there’s any quality that you must have to be a successful bowhunter, it’s confidence. Yet when you figure your chances of bagging a deer with bow and arrow, confidence is a quality that’s mighty hard to keep alive, especially after that first hour or two in the woods.
Even in Pennsylvania, one of the leading deer states, only about one hunter out of every 40 will score on a deer — buck or doe — with bow and arrow. In 1966, for example, an army of 92,792 bowhunters accounted for only 2,337 deer.
You have to be extremely lucky or a really expert woodsman to get within bow-and-arrow range of a deer. Then you have to drive an arrow into a vital area. Before the season, I’d spent many evenings practicing with my bow. It took a lot of practice before I could drive three out of five arrows into a bushel basket from 25 yards.
I’d been sitting on the stump for over an hour when I noticed a movement in the leaves not more than four feet from my boots. As I watched, a gray squirrel frisked past; then a second squirrel. They’d gotten that close to me without my hearing them.
“If the squirrels can move that quietly,” I thought to myself, “then maybe I can too. At least the deer don’t seem to be coming to me.”
I GOT DOWN off the stump, stretched, and started for the logging road.
I had a broadhead nocked on the bow string and eight more hunting arrows in the quiver hung from my belt. Moving a step at a time, being careful not to snap any twigs, I reached the trail.
Stomp! Stomp! I froze in my tracks. The sound was that of a deer. It sounded nearby, but I couldn’t tell where.
Then I heard it again, behind me, and I turned. At that instant the deer ran. I got glimpses of it as it trotted behind the brushpile, heading toward the road.
The buck bounded across the logging road, then went into the brush again. The clearing in the undergrowth was no wider than a car door, but the deer would have to pass through it. I had the bow at full draw, leading the deer, and released by pure instinct.
As the arrow sped on its way, the buck continued to run toward the open ing. Then the flight of the arrow and the path of the deer seemed to con verge, but I never saw the arrow strike. I just heard a thunk, and then the buck was clattering on down the hill.
Had I scored? I didn’t know, but after I got my legs under control, I went to take a look. Reaching the opening, I looked around for the arrow, then got down on my hands and knees to look some more.
The deer’s tracks — scuffed marks in the leaves — were plain enough. But no arrow. I began following the tracks. After 20 yards I came to a leaf with a spot of blood on it. Right then I decided to go back to Don for help.
He was sitting on a stump about 30 yards off the logging road.
“I got an arrow into a buck,” I told him. “I don’t know how bad it’s hit, but I got the start of a blood trail. Come on back and give me a hand in tracking it.”
We went to the opening and began tracking. We picked up the second spot of blood 10 yards from the first. From there on, the tracking got easier. Soon we were finding big splotches of bright-red blood on the ground and also on the leafy branches of low saplings.
After another 200 yards Don said, “Look ahead there. There’s your deer!” Sure enough, the buck lay sprawled in a rocky depression under a low hemlock. We approached cautiously, arrows nocked, ready. The deer never moved. I let fly from 15 yards with an insurance shot, driving an arrow into the deer’s neck, but it wasn’t needed. The buck was dead.
Our eyes widened as we came up to the deer.
“Ten points and what a rack!” Don said, grabbing an antler and lifting the head. “And look at the size!”
It was a big one, all right. My first arrow had hit him in the right side, angling forward into the lung. It had buried itself to within an inch of the feathers. I pulled the arrow out, and we heaved the deer from underneath the hemlock. I tagged the buck and we field-dressed it. We hadn’t brought along a rope to drag out a deer, so we each grabbed an antler and began dragging the buck back to the logging road.
THE SUN WAS well up in the sky, and it was hot and humid. By the time we reached the logging road, we were drenched in sweat. We still had a drag of over a quarter-mile to get to the car.
We’d drag for 20 yards, pause to catch our breath and then drag again.
Our work keeps Don and me in prime physical condition, but that deer was plenty heavy. We later found out that it weighed 204 pounds, field-dressed.
We still had 100 yards to go when another hunter came out of the woods. It was Bob Long, 19, who lives at the Long farm at the crossroads. He carried our bows and quivers while we tugged the buck the remaining distance to the car. It took all three of us to heave it into the trunk.
We stopped at the Long farm to drop Bob off, and before we left he got some rope and we got the deer out of the trunk and tied it over the hood of the car. Bob’s mother came out to look at the buck while we were tying it down.
“Well,” she said, “I see someone finally got that phantom buck. I’ve seen it in the fields a number of times.”
Up to that moment, Don and I had been so excited about my getting a deer, any deer, that it never occurred to us that the buck I’d downed was the fa mous phantom buck we’d heard so much about. We knew that I’d bagged a magnificent trophy, but we’d never connected it with the phantom. Now that we knew, another round of back slapping was in order.
We drove into Patton, stopped at my place to show the deer to my mother and sister, then went to Don’s home. We drove up and down main street to show our trophy off. Later we visited several nearby towns where we had hunting friends. Everywhere we went, crowds gathered to see the buck. It was quite a day!
Game Protector Hank Miller of Barnesboro, who checked the deer the next day, said that it was five years old. That meant that it had carried a legal rack for three full hunting sea sons. When we skinned the deer, it was easy to see how it had earned its reputation as the phantom. It had never been so much as grazed by a bullet or an arrow. We found several curved scars on its neck, but we concluded that they had been inflicted in fights with other bucks.
I took the head to Clearfield Taxidermy in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, to have it mounted. I was too late to en ter the head in the 1965 Trophy Buck Contest sponsored by the game com mission and the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association. This program, pat terned after the Boone and Crockett system of scoring and record keeping, was just getting underway that year, and measuring and scoring had been completed that spring. The purpose of the program is to compile records on all exceptionally large deer bagged in Pennsylvania. Awards are given for all time records and for the best trophies of the year.
Every second year, hunters are in vited to submit trophy racks regardless of the year taken, for scoring under the Boone and Crockett Club’s Official Scor ing System. In that first year, more than 1,300 racks were measured, some of them dating back to the 1800’s. Since I didn’t get my buck until October, and measuring had been completed that spring, I was unable to enter in 1965. Readers may remember that the all time Pennsylvania record for a typical whitetail deer that year went to Ray Miller of Bedford for a buck he killed in 1957. It scored 177 5/8 (see “Giant of Newcomer Hollow,” OUTDOOR LIFE, February 1966).
The game commission official, R. H. Sphar, scored my buck at 152 3/8. When it became evident that this would be a new state record, Game Protectors Fred Servey and George Church visited my home and spent two hours remeasuring the rack. This time the scoring was 155 1/8.
On September 23, 1967, my fiancee Alice Jane Duclos and I were guests at the second annual Deer Records Banquet at Allenberry, Carlisle. Readers who like to keep the record straight will be interested to learn that Ray Miller’s trophy head was displaced as the state’s all-time record for firearms by a typical whitetail trophy submit ted by Vernon and Maynard Reibson of Forksville. It had been killed by their late brother Floyd in 1931 and scored 180 4/8 against the 177 5/8 of Miller’s buck. The Reibson head had not been entered for the first measuring.
The highlight of the banquet, at least so far as I was concerned, came when my name was called and I went to the podium to receive my certificate and medallion from Glenn Bowers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, for the all-time record buck taken in the state with bow and arrow.
Read Next: ‘I’m Stupid, Yes,’ Says Wisconsin Man Who Tried to Claim a 49-Point High-Fence Deer Was a State Record
From the way archery hunting’s growing in popularity in Pennsylvania, it seems inevitable that my record won’t last long.
I suppose it’s almost inconceivable that any one archer out of any army of some 93,000 bowhunters would bring in a record buck twice in a row. Nevertheless, I’ll be out there trying with the rest of them.
I’m not convinced that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. This much I do know: records are made to be broken.
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