Bob Lehr of Pine Grove has surveyed properties for nearly 50 years, and he couldn't have done it without having the best possible assistant, his wife. On a spring morning in 2011, Janice Lehr was alternately crawling under and wrestling through a tangle of laurel bushes, looking for a marker defining a property corner for a Barnesville property, when she found the remains of a buck.

"At that point it was nothing more than some scraps of hide, scattered bones, part of a rib cage and the skull with the rack," Bob Lehr said. "She had found a few bones so we looked and uncovered the rest. We carried the skull and rack along with us and continued with the survey."When their work was finished, the Lehr's then showed the rack to the property owner, but he said he'd never shot a buck. Lehr, an avid hunter, took the rack home and hung it up inside his garage.Earlier this year, Bob and Janice Lehr are back in the area, surveying a Barnesville property owned by Mike and Amber Gross, which adjoins the property he surveyed in 2011. As he walks them along the property line, he tells the story about finding the rack.Mike and Amber Gross are my neighbors, and knowing that I hunt, they tell me about the rack to see if it could be mine. It isn't. But I remember a phone call I got from a hunter some years ago. Turns out it was in the fall of 2010.Charlie Fabian and his son Craig had been archery hunting on property owned by Mark Christ, which adjoins mine. Craig, just 16 at the time, had already taken a doe and a six-point buck in previous seasons. Although he knew he still had a lot to learn about hunting, Craig knew that the buck that sauntered within archery range was much better than the six-pointer."We didn't think it was hit really well but we were able to track it as it made a circle, crossed the creek, made a circle, crossed the creek……it did that several times and seemed to be generally following the creek," Charlie said. "We finally lost the trail, but kept looking for hours and hours before we had to give up the search."That's when he called me, the adjoining landowner to Mark Christ. They told me about the buck and asked if I'd help look. I did, extensively, on my property and on Mark's. But I called Charlie and told him I hadn't been able to find it either.That was the end of the buck story until Janice Lehr crawled into the dense underbrush more than five years later. The spot where the Lehr's found the buck is along the same creek where Charlie and Craig had searched, and maybe 150 yards from the last place they had a blood trail.When Bob Lehr learned that the rack's rightful owner had been found, he was thrilled."I'm very happy to be able to get the rack back to that young man," Lehr said. "Especially knowing that he's grown up to be someone who is serving the country."Craig Fabian is currently in Guam, serving in the Air Force, specializing in computer forensics. Back in Pennsylvania, a little backwoods' forensics has helped him recover a trophy from his youth."He was very excited at the time he shot it, because he knew it was a nice eight-pointer, but then he was very bummed that he didn't get it," Charlie Fabian said. "It's going to be great to hand the rack to him the next time he's home."