Hunters score major points as W.Va. firearms season opens

Before the turndown, it was not at all surprising to check in 200 deer on the first day of gun season at the store, according to Snow.

A 14-point buck holds the mark at the wildlife checking station for having the most tines of the deer’s antlers, according to Snow.


If Robert Hall got skunked while deer hunting last year, this year he reached nirvana when he brought down the “biggest deer I ever shot.”

Hall, 27, of Inwood, W.Va., was checking in his eight-point buck at the Handi-Stop in Tuscawilla Hills in Charles Town, W.Va., around 3:30 p.m. Monday. The deer was sharing the bed of his pickup truck with the all-terrain vehicle that he used to drag the heavy buck from the field.

“I was sitting down in this field around one o’clock when he came walking in with some does,” Hall said. “He was about 150 yards off, just standing there.”

Hall aimed his .270 caliber Browning, and downed the animal with a clean shot through the lungs, he said.

“I didn’t get a deer last year,” he said. “I’m going to have the head on this one mounted. We’ll eat the meat through the spring and summer.”

Hall said he does his own butchering.

“If you put this in the paper, I’ll have to buy doughnuts for the guys at work,” he said.

Hall is a firefighter with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Martinsburg.

Sean O’Hara, a clerk in the Handi-Stop, said Hall’s buck was the 20th deer checked in by mid-afternoon.

A clerk at the H Mart in Shepherdstown, W.Va., said 36 deer had been checked in there by 4 p.m.

“Eight, six, five, four,” rattled off Wanda Mason-Ballenger on the number of points on four of the six bucks that had been checked in by 2:30 p.m. at the Bakerton Market in Jefferson County. The seventh deer was a doe.

Mason-Ballenger said some of the hunters who brought in deer had combed the woods and fields of the Bakerton and Molers Crossroads areas for their prey.

Tony Jamison of Bakerton was leaving the store Tuesday afternoon on his way to the fields to begin his first try on opening day.

“I usually get a deer in this area,” he said. “There seems to be an abundance of them this year, bucks and does,” he said.

Jamison hunts with a bow, black powder and a .270 Remington.

“I just got here and they said this has been going on all day long,” said Brenda Via, a clerk at the EZ Mart on Blair Road in Hall Town, W.Va., at around 3 p.m. Monday. She was referring to the 26 deer that had already been checked in.

“The biggest one had 11 points,” she said. “Only two or three were does.”

Co-worker Amanda Long said hunters were lined up waiting to check deer when she came to work at 11 a.m.