Some stories just fall into your lap and write themselves – like this bowhunting tale from an old Powertown pal.

The object, squeezed into a large, rectangular, coffin-like wooden box on the bed of Rick Kostanski’s pickup truck, rolled up my upper Greenfield Meadows driveway on the morning after Thanksgiving. It was a beautiful, 10-point, whitetail buck. Bagged as the woods lightened at 7 a.m. on November 25, the carcass was headed to the Corliss butcher shop in Ashfield.

This 5½-year-old, 195-pound, grey-faced bruiser with a rut-swelled neck was a classic Franklin County buck – king of the hill, his typical antler configuration spread wide, brow tines broken from battling fall competitors for receptive females. For my friend, it was the buck of a lifetime. And, even more important from my perspective, its domain had been my neighborhood.

Though I had not seen this deer myself in recent travels, I may have crossed its path as a wobbly, spotted fawn following its mother out of its 2020 nest. I suspect that’s nearly certain. If not, I likely had several sightings of him as an inauspicious, small buck working his way up the neighborhood pecking order, with and without antlers.

I’m going to call Kostanski’s beautiful “racker” a “Sunken Meadow buck” because of where he harvested it with a precision heart-shot from his crossbow. The kill site sits atop a steep ravine overlooking the Green River from high above its east bank, directly across from Sunken Meadow, the floodplain dog-walking grounds I named and often wrote about in my Greenfield Recorder column. There I bumped into many deer and a few bears, along with various other wildlife and wonders of nature during my daily romps with my springer spaniel gundogs.

Aware of my intimate connections to his new hunting territory, which he was exploring in response to a homeowner’s complaints about deer damage to ornamental landscaping and gardens, Kostanski had reached out to me for insight several times this fall. His queries were sometimes accompanied by photos of new bucks that had passed his trail camera. Did they look familiar, he’d ask, to any deer I was seeing on my daybreak walks directly across the river?

One of these trail-cam photos showed a fork-horn I had not seen. Another displayed a five- or six-pointer I had probably seen several times in dim dawn light. The third was a trophy racker I knew I had not encountered. A day or two later, the big bruiser’s carcass was hanging in Kostanski’s Deerfield garage.

I did not know Kostanski from my South Deerfield youth. He grew up in Turners Falls and moved to my old hometown as a married adult. I was friends with his father, a well-known Powertown character I affectionately called the Honorable Walter T. Kostanski. A member of my father’s Greatest Generation, Walt was a key member of Coach Earl Worden’s fabled 1942 state-championship Turners Falls High School baseball team before serving in the Navy during World War II. In adulthood, he became an elected official, first as a state rep, then as the longtime Franklin County Registrar of Deeds.

I got to know his son Richard, six or seven years younger than me, on the softball diamond, at ice-fishing outings, and as a companion on open-water fishing trips to Maine’s Rangeley Lakes and Lake Ontario at Sodus Point, New York. I also recall an entertaining and quite productive shad-fishing outing in a bass-boat – I can’t recall whose – anchored along the edge of a migration channel under Sunderland Bridge,

But let us not digress. Back to the present, and the fateful day of Rick’s recent deer kill.

Our successful bowhunter arrived before daybreak and securely positioned himself upon his ladder-stand’s shooting platform to wait for the woods to awaken. The stand was a short distance inside a wood line bordering an open field where whitetails feed. As darkness faded, he spotted movement and recognized a few does passing through. Moments later the buck, obviously pursuing the does, appeared from a different angle.

When Kostanski burped out a couple of buck grunts from the grunt call hanging around his neck, the buck stopped and changed course. Now it was looping toward the bowstand to investigate what it thought was an antlered competitor for the does.

When the animal stopped within range, Kostanski’s crossbow was raised and ready. He aimed behind the deer’s shoulder, gently squeezed the trigger, and let fly. Miraculously, his arrow found its way through twigs and branches undiscernible to the human eye in the grey dawn light.

The deer flinched, moved a few strides, and laid down to die a few paces from where it was hit. The old battler soon expired peacefully. A quick, merciful kill.

Luckily, the final resting place was a mere 60 yards from Kostanski’s truck. After all, dragging 195 pounds of dead weight through the woods is a difficult chore for even a young man. Kostanski, in his mid-60s, was maneuvering on two replaced knees and a foot recovering from recent surgery that had put him in a walking-boot for a month. Despite his physical complications, he field-dressed the deer and dragged its heavy carcass to his truck, where lifting it onto the bed was a challenge.

When he got home, he sent me a cellphone photo of his trophy lying dead on the forest floor. He would have stopped at my house with it, he wrote, but was exhausted and wanted to return home, where more work awaited him. Three days later, buck onboard, he pulled into my yard on the way to the butcher shop.

How can you beat that? Column looming, a subject comes to my doorstep by special delivery.

Better still, the hunter is well known to many Gill-Montague readers, and the big buck lived and died in my neighborhood. The impressive 10-pointer without a doubt knew my old “Sunken Meadow” stomping grounds well, and lurked for years within clear sight of my home.