It was cold, rainy, and windy in west-central Pennsylvania on Dec. 3. Ashley Matchett knew the conditions were poor, but she still wanted to get a hunt in with her husband, Chad Janeski.
“Chad was leaving the next day to hunt in Illinois, and I wanted to spend some time hunting with him,” Matchett tells Outdoor Life. “I’d never shot a deer while sitting with him, and I thought it might be our last chance to hunt together this season.”
Later that afternoon, the couple headed to a private farm in Washington County where they had permission to hunt. They sat inside a pop-up cloth ground blind that overlooked a cut cornfield surrounded by trees.
“We got the blind for $10 at a flea market, but it worked just fine,” says Matchett, a gas company employee from Bulger, Pennsylvania. “We set it up a couple days before we hunted that evening, and even in the inclement weather we were snug and happy hunting together in that blind.”
About 5 p.m., a 4-point buck came out of the timber. Then a spike buck and a doe appeared. Soon Ashley saw another deer she thought was a buck, but it was too far away to tell. Chad looked through his binoculars and realized it was a huge deer that he’d heard about from other hunters.
“He said, ‘Oh, that’s Elk,’” says Matchett, who had never heard of the deer and had no idea that such a big buck was in the area.
Only a select few hunters knew about it, her husband explained, and they had tried their best to keep its whereabouts a secret. Janeski had never actually seen the deer in person, but he easily recognized it from some trail camera photos he’d been shown.
Matchett says that at first, she wanted her husband to shoot it. The buck was 250 yards away, and she’d never shot a deer at that distance.
But Janeski convinced her to try and take a long shot at the buck. After all, he said, it would be an amazing first deer for the two of them to harvest together. He also believed she could make the shot.
“Since I was a little girl my dad and I always shot rifles before deer season,” she said. “I’d also been practicing long range shooting with the Tikka rifle Chad got me last Christmas.”
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So, she centered the distant buck in the scope of her 6.5 PRC rifle. Then she held her breath, squeezed the trigger, and sent off a 143-grain bullet.
“The buck took off running, and I thought I missed him,” Ashley explains. “All the other deer I’ve shot just dropped. But when Elk ran, I panicked, and tried to take another shot.”
Chad was watching the buck through his binoculars, though. He saw it fall just 30 yards away from where it was hit.
Matchett says that as they approached the downed buck in the field, the rack seemed even larger than it had looked through her riflescope. She got to gutting the buck, and as they field dressed it, they saw that her bullet had hit near the bottom of Elk’s heart.
Later that evening, after they got the buck hung for skinning and processing, they saw that the buck had been hit by an arrow previously. They could see the broadhead wound near its rib cage.
“The arrow went completely through the deer, but it didn’t hit any vitals. The wound was pretty nasty looking, but Elk was chasing a doe, so he must have been okay.”
Elk has 14 points, and a 22.5-inch spread. The husband and wife have not yet had the rack scored.
“That’s the longest shot on a deer I ever made,” Ashley said. “And for a buck like that to be in Pennsylvania is incredible. It was a real surprise. I thought a hunter would have to travel to Illinois or out West to see a deer like Elk.”
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