By Tom Davidson
MERCER COUNTY — After four years spent lamenting the buck that got away, Erin Hilla’s first shot hit home Monday, when she dropped a seven-point buck about 3 p.m. and started screaming in ecstasy.
A couple of friends were pushing the deer toward her in the woods off Halfway Road in Greene Township when, “I saw it coming through the woods, and I shot it,” Ms. Hilla said.
“I screamed. I was excited, it was like Christmas Day,” the 24-year-old Jamestown woman said while reliving the kill over a cold beverage at Jacob’s Gable Inn outside of town.
She was still giddy as she celebrated with her hunting companions as a Hank Williams Jr. song played on the jukebox.
Ms. Hilla, a Mercer County 911 dispatcher, explained how she’s visited the bar after hunting the last four years with tales of missed opportunities. Those days are over.
She bagged the buck with a 30.06 and hung it in a garage before she came to Jacob’s to celebrate.
She was in and out of the bar, taking cell phone calls and sending pictures of the carcass to friends and family. She sent her mom a picture of the buck moments after shooting it — something that an old-timer at the bar marveled at.
He remembered waiting an hour at a drug store to get a picture taken of his first kill. The image of a dead deer and smiling hunter is an iconic part of the first day of buck season, an all-but official holiday in western Pennsylvania.
Hunters on Monday were challenged by sporadic drizzle that muddied trails and a lack of snow that made spotting deer tough, some said.
Brian Hobson, 28, of Greenville, hunted on the ridge along West River Road south of Big Bend on the Shenango River in Jefferson Township.
Hobson said he saw someone bag an eight-pointer but didn’t have much luck himself. He and a friend’s footfalls rustled the ground cover on the hillside as shots echoed every few minutes.
Scott Kirby and his 18-year-old son Logan hunted off of East Crestview Drive in Delaware Township, where Kirby bagged a nine-point at 1:51 p.m., according to the buck tag.
He normally hunts during archery season but was too busy this year. He hit the buck from about 200 yards with his “gold old 7mm-08, he said.
Deer season also means a boon at the county’s independent meat processors, places like Liszka Meats in Delaware Township, where 15-year-olds Ricky Arthur and Nick Micsky laughed as they worked.
Nick’s job was to prune off the deer legs and put them into a 55-gallon barrel that was a third full by mid-afternoon. Ricky used a razor-sharp knife to notch hides before a vertical winch peeled off the skin like a banana.
There was a steady stream of hunters dropping off their kill in the afternoon and things would only get busier as the night set in, workers said.
Pennsylvania’s two-week rifle deer season runs through Dec. 12 and an estimated 750,000 hunters are expected to take to woods and fields in search of deer.
Between 80,000 and 90,000 deer are expected to be killed on opening day, which is nearly one-third of the 300,000 deer that the Pennsylvania Game Commission estimates will be shot during the season.
The Game Commission says hunters harvested an estimated 335,850 deer in the state’s 2008-09 seasons. That’s up four percent from the previous seasons harvest of 323,070. Hunters killed 122,410 antlered deer and 213,440 antlerless deer.
The Game Commission reported Monday afternoon that four people were wounded in three accidents on the first day, but none of the injuries was life threatening.
An accident in Indiana County wounded a 10-year-old girl and her father. Two other men were injured Monday in Westmoreland and Lackawanna counties.
There weren’t any hunting-related emergency calls Monday, a spokeswoman for Mercer County’s 911 center said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
