1983 in Walpack, shot a spike on opening morning of 6 day, me and a bunch of friends went together, we were 18 years old and knew it all! LOL. Tree bark pants, red plaid woolrich jacket, and a blaze orange knit cap from K-mart, we had it all also! Anyway, after an uneventful morning we went for lunch, then decided to take a walk up a mountain were I had bowhunted earlier in the year. As soon as we stepped of the roadway, a bunch of deer including a few small bucks got up in the snow about 200 yds up the hill, well I knew where an old logging road intersected where they were running, I ran like Carl Lewis for the gold, and after sitting down a minute to catch my breath, I saw two does and the spike behind them running straight at me, not a clue that i was there. I waited til the last minute and raised my 870 Wingmaster that I bought at Edelmans, aimed for the spike between the front legs as he was running at me, and the rest was history. I remember we dragged the buck to the road, which was a few hundred feet downhill in the snow, and at that point we found out that one of the guys was full of shit, as he had said earlier that he had gutted a bunch of deer at his fathers place in NY in the past. He could not even make the first cut in the belly, and when he finally did he punctured the stomach and a minute later he was over the guardrail heaving his brains out. After standing there for what seemed like hours but was probably 15 minutes, a Conservation Officer stopped and walked us through the processs. We tied the Buck, with the huge spikes up so everyone could see of course, on the hood of our jeep, and drove home like we killed godzilla. We still laugh about it now, 31 years later. Since then a few hundred have gone down in front of me, but not too many as memorable as the this one.
