When the Pennsylvania Game Commission adopted a controversial antler restriction policy beginning with the 2002 deer season, a few critics claimed that the PGC was trying to create a trophy state on par with Illinois or Iowa. For everyone except junior hunters, shooting yearling spikes and forkhorns became history.

They don't come much wider than this! Dave's 11-point monster, taken in western Pennsylvania, sported a 27-inch outside spread. Dave's awesome trophy grossed 174 5/8 inches.

Indeed, the antler restriction policy has in no way made Pennsylvania a "trophy state," because its aim was primarily to give the deer herd more bucks with greater maturity by allowing as many as possible to survive beyond their first set of antlers. Now the buck harvest is no longer overwhelmingly composed of yearlings. Many bucks survive to 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 years of age, and with every season those bucks get smarter and harder to kill.

That means older bucks have acquired an aptitude for eluding one of the biggest orange armies in North America. And few have been more impressive than the massive typical buck that Dave Zagorski shot last fall -- a 5 1/2-year-old buck with antlers more than 2 feet wide -- officially taped at 24 5/8 inches inside!

If anyone is tempted to think that's not impressive, consider the numbers. Of the 11,031 whitetails entered in the Boone and Crockett records, fewer than 5 percent have an inside spread of 2 feet or more. And that includes both typical and non-typical racks. Even if Dave's buck wasn't a B&C qualifier, that fact alone puts the deer in an elite class.

We sometimes hear deer camp stories of racks so wide they won't fit between trees, but almost none actually reach such legendary width. And in Pennsylvania we're not talking about a Midwestern corn-fed monster hiding out in some brush-choked river bottom to avoid hunting pressure. We're talking an Eastern state with almost a million hunters!

A FREIGHT TRAIN OF A BUCK
Dave himself had mixed feelings when the state embarked on the new antler restriction policy seven years ago. An avid archer and gun hunter his entire life, he was glad he could consider almost any buck legal -- even if he decided to pass on the yearlings.

Dave hunts in the western part of the state, and he killed his freight train of a buck in Beaver County a few miles from his home in Ellwood City. He knew about the buck because he glimpsed it one day in 2007 while heading to a stand. The huge buck walked out onto a pipeline about 200 yards away, but quickly ran off. Dave never heard of anyone killing it, so at the beginning of the 2008 season he felt confident that there was a good buck running around behind his dad's house.

Dave's confidence was found to be justified one day in early October when his dad, Lou, was walking his Labrador retriever on the hill behind his house and saw the enormous buck stand up 35 yards away. The buck wasn't spooked, but simply looked at him as if to say, "What are you doing here?" before walking off. The fact that the dog never noticed the buck made it seem like a dream to Lou.

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