I Tracked a Buck for 36 Hours to Find a Game Warden Had Already Taken the Antlers

Al Harakal was about ready to give up deer hunting for the season on Sunday afternoon, when he headed back over to Shenango Lake from his home in Hermitage, Pennsylvania. Harakal had shot the biggest buck of his life near Shenango Saturday morning, and this was the third time he’d returned to the spot to look for the 8-point. He’d lost the blood trail multiple times and was tipped off by a bird hunter, who made a Facebook post about the downed buck and shared the coordinates with him.

When he finally walked up on his deer, though, Harakal could hardly believe his eyes. Both of its antlers had been sawed off at the bases.

“At this point, I’m beside myself, and I’m screaming, ‘Who in the ____ would do this?!” Harakal tells Outdoor Life. “So I called that pheasant hunter from Ohio, who’d originally found the deer, and I’m like, ‘You’re not gonna believe this. The rack’s gone.’”

As mad and confused as Harakal was at that moment, he was in for an even bigger surprise later that evening, when he found out it was a Pennsylvania game warden who’d cut off the antlers and confiscated them. 

The Bolt Hits High

Harakal timed his hunt well on Saturday. He saw a few does just after sunrise, and then watched as a heavy 8-point stepped out of a thicket to chase one. The doe circled his tree stand and led the buck right in front of Harakal, who stopped it with a loud grunt before touching off his crossbow. 

“I thought when I ranged a nearby tree that he was at 34 yards … but after looking and re-ranging, he was really closer to 26. So I hit high,” Harakal says. “When I shot, it sounded like the bolt hit a brick wall.”

Shaking, Harakal called his buddy Derek, who came out to help him track the buck. They found the bloody crossbow bolt and a couple spots of blood, but the trail disappeared about 60 to 70 yards into the brush. After circling the area for a couple hours, Derek had to leave and Harakal went home for lunch. He couldn’t stop thinking about the deer, though, so he called another friend, Mark, and they met near the tree stand late Saturday afternoon. The two hunters searched until dark without finding another drop of blood.

Harakal’s next move was contacting Trent Williams with FastRak Whitetail Recovery, who said he’d be there with his dog, Red, the next morning. They started tracking around 10:30 a.m. Sunday.

“Red gets on the trail right away, he’s tracking this thing, and he found where the buck had bedded down at one point. So Trent’s looking down at this blood, and he finds a chunk of vertebrae and rib bone,” Harakal says. “Trent goes, ‘Just like I figured. You hit it high, just below the spine.’”

They followed Red for another hour or so, but Williams was worried they were tracking a live deer. Eventually he called it off and told Harakal they might never find the buck.

“I‘d gotten excited and I was back on that high, because we found that vertebrae … but now I’m just depressed again. I go home, and I don’t even know what to do.”

Harakal was still stewing on his couch around 1:30 p.m. Sunday when his phone started blowing up. A couple buddies were saying they’d seen a Facebook post on a local hunting page that was made by a pheasant hunter. The hunter had traveled to Shenango Lake from Ohio to chase birds, and he came across the dead buck sometime Sunday morning.  

“They found it dead in the field, and were asking if somebody knows whose it might be,” says Harakal. “So now I’m back on cloud nine.”   

The Missing Puzzle Piece

Shortly after sending him a direct message, Harakal got a call from the pheasant hunter, who had made it back home to Ohio. He was cautious at first about sharing too many details, but once Harakal texted him a past trail cam picture of the same buck, he agreed to send Harakal the coordinates, along with a picture of him holding the dead 8-pointer by its antlers.

Returning to Shenango for the third time now, Harakal walked straight to the coordinates he’d been given. The deer was lying there on some state-owned land about 1.7 miles from where Harakal had shot it. It hadn’t been field dressed, and the carcass was untouched aside from the cut-off antlers. And there was no question it was Harakal’s buck.

“I still had the piece of vertebrae that Red found. And I could reach in the entry and exit wounds on the deer and feel that piece of bone missing,” Harakal says. “I’m like, ‘This is the missing puzzle piece.’”

Going over the timeline in his head, Harakal figured it had only been a few hours between the time the pheasant hunter found the deer and when he walked up on it. Unsure of what to do, he called back one of his friends, who encouraged him to report it to the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Harakal tried calling but didn’t get an answer as he walked back to his truck.

“I was just going home at that point. And I decided my season’s done. I’m not hunting for the rest of the year.”

Back at home, Harakal was about to hop in the shower when he got a call back from a PGC game warden. He shared the full story with the warden and agreed to meet him at the deer, and then he drove back to Shenango Lake for a fourth time.

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Harakal still had the bone fragments in his pocket, and when they got to where the deer was still laying, he showed the game warden the missing puzzle piece. He said he still couldn’t believe someone had robbed him of the biggest buck he’d ever killed.

“The game warden tells me, ‘This is like one-in-a-million chances, but that is definitely your deer. And I don’t even know how to tell you this. But it’s our policy that when something like this happens, we cut the rack off.’”

The game warden then led Harakal back to his own truck, where he pulled the two antlers off his backseat and handed them over. He explained how the pheasant hunter had called the agency after finding the 8-point buck, and that he was just following standard procedure when he confiscated the antlers. Then he helped Harakal drag the buck out of the field.

“It was an emotional rollercoaster. I’d gone from high to low to high to just wanting to give up on hunting, and then I ended up tagging that deer,” says Harakal. “And if it wasn’t for Red finding the vertebrae, and this guy in Ohio putting the post on Facebook, I don’t know if I ever would have found it.”