Lost and Found

This article was first published in the September/October 2024 issue of Outdoor Oklahoma magazine.

An early afternoon run in with a rattlesnake made the hunt interesting. Shooting my best black powder buck to date an hour later made it memorable. But it’s the story’s epilogue that made my 2023 season truly unforgettable.

As soon as he saw pictures of my black powder buck, my nephew, Nolan, who lives and breathes deer hunting, called with his congratulations. After sharing the story of the hunt, Nolan asked what I was going to do with my buck’s rack. I told him that I didn’t have the money to spend on a shoulder mount and intended to find someone to boil the skull for a European mount. He asked if he and his girlfriend could make a run at it. Because nothing says romance like scraping gray matter out of a brain cavity, right? I left the deer head with him when we visited my brother’s house for Thanksgiving and got a text from Nolan just two weeks later that read, “Hey, I’ll give you that head back at Christmas. Should have it done this weekend.”

But Christmas came and went without mention of the mount. Before I knew it, we had rung in the New Year and I still hadn’t heard anything from Nolan. I kept telling myself that I needed to call and ask for an update, but then I’d get busy and forget. So when my brother called in the middle of January sounding like someone had just died, news of my skull mount wasn’t even on my radar. The first words out of his mouth were, “Dude, your deer head disappeared.”

Apparently, Nolan had left the skull in a five gallon bucket in the driveway at my brother’s place and walked into the house to grab something. When he came back out, the bucket was empty and the head was nowhere to be found. I figured a dog had carried it off and when I suggested as much to my brother, he said it would had to have been a big dog. I’m sure he was trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t work.

Nolan called that night and apologized profusely. He had had a banner year in the deer woods, killing a great buck with his muzzleloader and then an even better one with his bow, and he offered me my choice of their shoulder mounts as repayment for losing my deer head. I declined, of course, and tried to laugh it off. Actually, I had accepted the loss easier than I had expected to, but there’s no denying that it stung. I don’t kill just a whole lot of nice deer and treasure those that I do, but I had made up my mind that I was going to be content with the pictures and the memories that I did have. That was going to be easier said than done, I knew. Time heals all wounds, though, and when my nephew called two months later sounding like he’d just won the lottery, news of my skull mount wasn’t even on my radar. He blurted out that my deer head had been located, but I had to slow him down to get the story.

Turns out, a neighbor had found the head on his property and noticed when he picked it up that the rack had a zip tie around its main beam. There had once been a carcass tag attached to that zip tie with all of my personal information on it, and that would have made returning it to me a much easier task, but the tag had been lost in the shuffle. So that neighbor called Michael Zimmerman, the game warden for Grady County, and asked what he ought to do. Fortunately for me, Warden Zimmerman remembered a Facebook post he’d seen wherein my nephew had poured out his heart pleading for the safe return of my missing deer rack and called him.

After comparing pictures and questioning Nolan about the deer’s rack, Warden Zimmerman had the confirmation he needed to put my nephew in touch with the gentleman who had discovered my deer head. As soon as Nolan finished relaying the story, I ended the call with him and dialed Warden Zimmerman myself. He was as shocked as I was that my deer head had been found and sounded genuinely happy to hear that it would be returned to its rightful owner. In his line of work, I doubt many stories like mine have happy endings.

But my story’s ending couldn’t be happier. Losing and finding that deer head allowed me to celebrate the buck twice, and I made as many phone calls to share the news that my deer head had been found as I did the day I shot him. There was, however, one small problem. Without the deer’s rack in hand, I had been telling everyone I knew that the deer I’d lost had been a record book buck for sure and that it might even challenge the state’s top spot. Now that he’s been found, I don’t know how I’m going to explain myself!