A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Scott Albaugh, recently retired and enjoying freedom from his oil refinery job, takes a walk nearly every morning. He heads out the door of the house he grew up in so many decades ago and into the woods of a heavily forested part of Warren County, Pennsylvania. Sometimes he goes and sits in a treestand, but he had already shot a nice 8-point on Oct. 27. With no need to put in treestand time on Nov. 3, the plan for Albaugh’s morning hike in the cold autumn air was to climb the hill the way the bear goes over the mountain — just to see what he could see. And what he saw was a whitetail he couldn’t have imagined.
He left the house and crossed the railroad tracks that have run through the valley forever, and there he noticed lots of blood and hair, and a deer’s leg lying beside the steel rails. Albaugh had to investigate. Down the tracks lay the body of a white-tailed buck. Obviously the train hit the buck and probably killed it instantly before roughing it up by dragging it for about 50 yards under the train.
The steel wheels severed all four legs, and the undercarriage of the train probably rolled the deer over and over until it came out behind the train, shattering the 9-point rack in the process. Albaugh inspected the buck and discovered that rigor mortis hadn’t stiffened the carcass yet, which was still warm and full of ticks now slowly abandoning their host. The ticks had no future there without blood circulating in the deer.
The buck had been hit in the early morning darkness as the train rumbled from Erie to Kane, Pennsylvania and points beyond. While cars and trucks often collide with deer on blacktop highways, an iron rail highway has far less traffic so it can’t be often that a deer takes on a locomotive. How would that happen?
Well, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, even when he’s a white-tailed buck. And especially when he’s a buck in November. “I guess the rut MUST be on!” said Albaugh. “This dummy decided to take on the train early this morning!” The mature 9-point had no doubt seen and heard the train many times before, but it has always clattered harmlessly by. With the scent of an estrus doe in his nostrils, this time that old locomotive would be a problem. It caused the buck to sacrifice his life for November’s opportunity — a one-track mind died on two steel tracks.
Albaugh searched until he found all the pieces of the antlers, took them home to reconstruct the rack, and discovered it’s a buck he had in a trail camera photo. It’s an unusual trophy for sure, but when it comes to bringing home a whitetail rack, hey — a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
— Steve Sorensen (aka “The Everyday Hunter®”) is an avid deer hunter from Pennsylvania and is a frequent sportsman’s dinner speaker.
