'Bull #53' was alive after all
By Marcus Schneck Harrisburg Patriot-News (Reprinted with permission).

It wasn't the monster buck our outdoor writer Jim Zoschg thought he was shooting, but it was certainly one that few hunters would pass up.

The elk hunting season lasted just five minutes for Aaron Richards of Duncannon.

After an estimated 56 hours of scouting, across several weekends leading up to the opener, the 29-year-old Perry County man experienced the shortest season of any of the 40 hunters whose names had been drawn by the Game Commission for 2007 permits.

With the squeeze of the trigger on his 7mm Remington at 6:27 a.m. at a food plot in Cameron County's Gibson Township, Richards downed the first elk of the season. It was a 768-pound, 6x6 bull that he and his hunting buddy, Bryan Hale, had been eyeing.

They had first seen the bull alone in the same area two weekends before the season.

When they located him again on Nov. 3, he was roaming with a herd of 30 other elk that by the following morning had grown to about 50, including a second large-racked bull.

Their scouting had given them a good read on the elk, but it also revealed one big hitch: The elk probably would move out of the food plot and into the surrounding timber within minutes of sunrise.

Aaron Richards and the bull that many elk followers thought was already dead.

So, by daybreak, they had stalked silently to the edge of the food plot and breathed a sigh of relief. The elk were still there.

"In the dark we could hear them all around us," Richards said.

The bulls were bugling challenges at each other and jousting with their antlers, as a late second rut surged hormones through them, weeks after the primary rut had ended.

"It was everything I expected and more," he said. "I wasn't anticipating hearing them bugling and fighting that late in the year."

They were both experienced hunters and had been traveling to Pennsylvania's elk range to see the big animals every fall for many years and applying for the permit drawing every year since the lottery hunt began in 2001.

Richards talked to some guides and they expressed confidence in his abilities to make the hunt on his own.

A part of the plan that didn't work out was Richards' hope to bag his elk with archery equipment, as he had done previously with deer.

He had his archery gear along, planning on the rifle as a fall-back weapon, but found wind and terrain conditions and the movements of the animals poorly suited for archery.

That was a small glitch in a hunting memory to last a lifetime, enhanced by the notoriety of the elk that Richards bagged.

It was the famous No. 53, the constant companion of bull No. 63 until last year, when the latter was killed by a hunter and eventually proved itself to be the top bull ever taken in Pennsylvania.

Until the tags in the ears of Richards' elk proved them wrong, Game Commission biologists had assumed No. 53 had been poached. They found the radio collar it had been wearing about a year and a half ago, and it seemed to show evidence of having been cut from the animal.

Regulars in the range were familiar with the elk and told Richards that his bull seemed to have reached its peak and was beginning to show its age through declining antler size with each passing year, an amazing observation on a bull carrying antlers that measured 52 inches from tip to tip and 52 inches along the main beam.

Knowing all that about his elk's history has made Richards hungry for more than the 200 pounds of steaks, roasts, burger, meat sticks and such he and his friends butchered off the animal.

He's been trying to contact several photographers noted for their work in the state's elk range to obtain old photos of the bull. "The history behind it makes it all the more special for me," he explained.