Thursday, November 19, 2009
Thanksgiving Day buck grabs headlines after 40 years of obscurity
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
Photo courtesy Denny Quaiff
Lanny Bolen with the buck that caused a big stir this year.
You have to wonder how many deer heads bearing record-book racks are stuffed away in someone’s attic, never officially measured, never scored, never written up by the media, mostly forgotten -- except for the small group of people who participated in the hunt.
Lanny Bolen has such an obscure rack, a 27-pointer he killed in Chesterfield County on Thanksgiving Day, way back in 1967.
Why write about it now? Well, it wasn’t until recently that Bolen brought the buck out of the closet, so to speak, and it has become a major “what might have been” story that has captivated the attention of hunters this year.
Bolen, who lived in Maryland and was in his 30s at the time of the kill, dropped the buck with a charge of OO shot on a cold, snow-spitting afternoon. He was hound hunting as a guest of his friend Frank Norris from Chester, a member of the Beach Hunt Club.
Shortly before Bolen shot the buck, the weather had turned so raw that he seriously was contemplating calling it quits, but a fellow hunter talked him into staying.
The massive buck caused quite a stir in the hunt area. It won a big-buck contest at the country store where Bolen checked it. The prize was a 12-gauge shotgun, which Bolen gave to Marshall Thompson. He was the hunter who urged Bolen not to give up that day.
An estimated 300 people showed up to see the deer, then Bolen loaded up the cape and antlers and headed home. The buck came to be known in Bolen’s circle of friends as the Medusa Buck, the named derived from the Greek mythology character that had snakes swirling out of her head in every direction. That fit, because the buck had a mass of twisted tines. When Bolen first spotted it, he said that he thought it had a double rack.
The buck hung on the wall of Bolen’s home for more than 30 years. Then in 2002 he moved it to a bar he owned in the Renick, W.Va., area, where it peered through glass eyes at the people who would drive out of their way to see it. Still, it managed to escape the kind of attention it merited, such as a major big game show or national magazine article. I have been writing about trophy bucks killed in Virginia since the early '60s, and it was 40 years before I heard about it.
All that changed last March when Bolen and his son, Chuck, took the head to the big Dixie Deer Classic in Raleigh, N.C. The reaction was a bit like someone walking into an art show with a painting by one of the masters that no one had seen before.
The buck scored 236-3/8 non-typical Boone and Crockett. A few months earlier, it had measured 236 under Virginia’s unique scoring system. Had Bolen entered it in competition immediately after killing it, the buck likely would have ranked sixth in the Virginia record book.
Although it came late, the publicity this year has been fast and furious. Denny Quaiff, executive director of the Virginia Deer Hunters Association, wrote an excellent four-page spread in the October issue of the association’s magazine, Whitetail Times. In August, Bolen had brought the rack to the association’s Virginia Deer Classic in Richmond, where it finished first in the Historical Division. It was the top-scoring buck of the entire show.
North American Whitetail Magazine devoted six pages to Bolen’s story in its November issue.
One book Bolen isn’t likely to make is the Virginia State Record Book.
“To my knowledge, there is no way to enter a historical head into the Virginia State Record Book’ said Matt Know, deep project leader of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
Bucks entered must have been killed the previous season. The trophy still can make the Boone and Crockett records, where it is expected to rank fourth amount non-typical ranks from Virginia. Leading that group is a massive 31-point buck killed in Warren County in 1993 by James Smith of Front Royal. It scored 257-4/8 Boone and Crockett and 296 Virginia.
NOTE: North American Whitetail Magazine said the Bolen buck scored 276-1/2 under the Virginia measuring system, but the actual score was 236, according to Buddy Fasion, a spokesman for the contest. The magazine also reported that the buck had 25 points, but two major shows in Virginia reported it had 27.
