North-central Pennsylvania’s Tioga County is rugged rolling terrain that holds plenty of whitetail deer. And on the November 29, opening morning of the state rifle deer season, 29-year-old hunter Ben Harris was in a ladder stand on private property looking for a buck he’d been after all season.
“It was a beautiful 20-degree morning and bucks were in rut,” Harris tells Outdoor Life. “I was looking for a good 10-pointer with a sticker 11th point. He was a buck I almost got during this year’s bow season.”
On opening day of gun hunting Harris was overlooking a big soybean field. He started seeing deer soon after daybreak. Four does were feeding across the field and before long, the big buck appeared.
“He came out of the woods into the field about 30 minutes after sunup,” says Harris, a truck driver and farmer from Morris, PA. “Then he went back into the woods, then came out again into the opening. He was walking closer to me when I got my 7mm Ruger on him at 250 yards, and shot.”
The buck ran 50 yards back to the woods edge and dropped. Harris phoned his father, who met him with an ATV to retrieve the buck and take it back to their hunt camp.
That morning Harris saw a couple other young bucks working around the soybean field. So back at his deer camp Harris asked a young teenage friend named Calvin if he’d like to return to the same ladder stand with him that afternoon.
“I thought one of the other smaller bucks might come by so Calvin could get one,” Harris says. “We both went back to my ladder stand about 3:30 p.m. We weren’t there 10 minutes when an 8-pointer showed in the soybeans and Calvin dropped the buck with his rifle at 208 yards.”
They went to check out Calvin’s buck, but after some congratulations and photos, Ben realized there was still an hour of daylight left. So the pair went back to the ladder stand, hoping to fill Ben’s doe tag.
“Just 10 minutes before dark a doe offered me a 100-yard shot in the soybean field, and I got her,” Harris says. “That made three deer in one day from one tree stand – something we’ll probably never do again.”
The hunters returned to their deer camp with Calvin’s buck and Ben’s doe, and they celebrated the pair’s good hunting day with their buddies.
Ben’s buck was entered in a local big buck contest and was green scored at 150 4/8s inches. He’ll have a shoulder mount made of his buck, and Calvin will have a European mount made of his deer.
“In our deer camp that night with our friends and neighbors, our day’s hunt was the talk of the dinner table,” Harris says. “It was an incredible day.”