Wallagrass man hoping his deer’s a record-setter

WALLAGRASS – Trophy deer don’t come to every hunter, but they are out there in the northern Maine woods.

Gerald Marquis believes a buck he shot on Nov. 15 is a trophy because of the size of the antlers on the animal. The rack was twice the size of other deer racks he has on the wall in his garage.

Marquis, 42, has been hunting since he was 15 years old, and he has never seen a set of antlers like the one on the deer in his garage. He’s shot over a dozen deer through the years.

The 265-pound field-dressed deer has a 12-point rack. It’s a huge rack.

The most significant part of the rack is the size of the antlers. The base of the rack is 83/4 inches in circumference.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years of hunting,” he said Tuesday, still excited about his deer. “I wish my father was here to see this.

“I’ve been told by many people, and at least 400 people have stopped to see this deer since Thursday, that they’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “Only one man has been able to wrap his fingers all around it.”

He shot the deer while he was having lunch while hunting in the woods near Allagash.

“I was riding and taking a bite of a sandwich when I saw two does off the right side of the road,” he said. “I slowed and saw the does were looking away from me.

“When I looked in that direction I saw the buck,” he said. “I dropped the sandwich, stopped, got out and walked off the road and shot it.”

He said the buck was about 300 feet off the road when he shot it.

Wilza Robertson of Portage has been scoring deer antlers for organizations like Buckmaster, Boone and Crockett and the Maine Antler and Skull Trophy Club for better than 20 years.

She hasn’t seen Marquis’ deer, but she has seen photographs of it.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said of the pictures. “I hope he brings it to me to be scored.

“It’s certainly out of the ordinary, most definitely,” she said. “Six or seven inches is considered big and four or five inches is generally a good size.”

She said the antlers have to be dried for 60 days before they can be scored for competition because they do shrink.

The measurement is done at the base of the antlers, near the skull.

Boone and Crockett is an international organization that scores big game for all of North America. Buckmaster is a scoring group for white tail deer only in the U.S. and MASTC scores wildlife killed in Maine.

Arlen Lovewell, assistant wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fish and Game. He has also seen pictures of Marquis’s deer.

“It looks to be a real nice rack,” he said. “It seem very heavy and quite large.”

He said such large antlers get to be that way because of nutrition and genetics.

“It must have fed well, and come from an area with a low deer population,” he said. “It’s probably an older deer.”