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By Louie Stout

Hunter’s 100-year-old Deer Mount Is One for the Record BooksHunter’s 100-year-old Deer Mount Is One for the Record Books

Back in the early 1990s, Bill Nielsen was looking for some loose antlers that he could use to help rattle in bucks during the mating season.

For those who don’t know, a deer hunter will bang a pair of antlers together to imitate two bucks fighting over territorial rights when there are females around. Such a tactic can call in a big buck that has already claimed that turf.

Anyway, one day Nielsen remembered a big ol’ buck that hung over his grandparents’ fireplace in a cottage near Greenville, Mich., where he visited during his younger days.

“My grandma had passed away and my dad’s sister had inherited the cottage,” the Niles sportsman said. “I remember there used to be a .22 rifle hanging in the antlers and a bunch of fishing lures hanging off the deer’s ears.”

He called his aunt who said she was going to throw it out and he could have it. Nielsen drove to Grand Rapids to meet a family member and pick up the old mounted deer head.

He quickly changed his mind.

“I took one look at it and said there’s no way I can cut the antlers off this magnificent mount,” said Nielsen. “There’s a steel hunting tag dated 1920 on the right antler and it had my uncle’s hunting license number on it,’ he said. “I thought that was pretty cool.”

It’s been nearly 30 years since Nielsen obtained the 10-point buck mount and this past hunting season marked the 100th anniversary of the kill. And while it’s an old-school mount, it still looks pretty good in Nielsen’s trophy room.

The more he examined the deer, the more he thought about entering it into the Michigan Commemorative Bucks Program.
So in 1992 he had it officially scored at 140.5, and it made it into the books.

“I registered it under my great uncle’s name, the man who shot it with a rifle in 1920 in Acosta County,” Nielsen said.

There is nothing ordinary about this 10-pointer, either. Nielsen said the left antler is webbed similar to a caribou and the body must have been huge.

“You should see the neck on this thing!” he said. “The deer had to weigh 300 pounds; the muzzle from the rack to the end of the nose is almost twice as big and as wide as any mount I’ve got; and I have mounts of deer that weighed 220 pounds.”

The impressive buck still had a black nose, whiskers and eyelashes. It wasn’t a modern-day mount, but impressive, nonetheless.

“You can see the furniture stuffing in its ears that they used back then,” he added.

The 100-year-old buck hangs on Nielson’s wall, along with several others that he has killed. He also has a deer on the wall that his late father shot.

“I have a wall of deer ‘heirlooms’ for my boys to have some day,” Nielsen said.