king' s outdoor world - Index

king' s outdoor world - Hunting Illustrated Magazine Dec/Jan 2008 - Coyote Crazy! - Index

BY NONDY WEAVER
D
ennis King is a good friend of mine. One fi ne
evening, he sat down with me and told me his story
of how, when, and where he harvested an incredible
blacktail buck.
It was late October of 1970 and it was pouring rain
in the Little Applegate drainage in southwestern Oregon.
Between rainstorms, Dennis and a hunting friend, Charley
Spencer, were glassing the ridges using a spotting scope. On
an open ridge, a thousand yards straight up, they spotted a
lone blacktail. Even at that distance, they could tell he was
huge.
For the next two hours the men fought through
the underbrush and vegetation, climbing the ridge to close
the gap. When they fi nally reached the edge of the clearing
that should have been an excellent vantage point, the big
buck had gone. After some searching, they discovered that
the buck vacated the area by using a trail that headed for a
distant ridge. Tired and frustrated, the two called it quits for
the day but vowed to return.
The same scenario repeated itself three days later.
Once again, Dennis and Charley spotted the buck in the same
place as before and invested two hours of climbing to get
into position. The animal was long gone when they arrived.
42 HUNTING ILLUSTRATED.com
THE KING
BLACKTAIL
They walked down the ridge a second time, empty-handed,
but even more determined.
That evening Dennis and Charley brainstormed
ways to get close enough to that buck to get a shot at him.
After this second setback, the pressure was on. With a good
night’s rest they agreed to attack the ridge the next morning
at daylight and hoped the deer would be in the same place as
before.
Dawn brought with it what Dennis likes to call a
“frog strangler” of a rainstorm with visibility of 200 yards,
at most. The plan was for Charley to climb the steep slope
as he had done twice before. Dennis would ascend another
ridge that the buck had followed to elude them the fi rst two
times.
After battling the brush for an hour, Dennis
stumbled across a game trail heading toward the buck’s
favorite clearing. But, there was a problem. Deer are half the
height of humans and, when the trail went under manzanita
brush, Dennis had to crawl on his hands and knees though
the tunnels. In a short time, Dennis was a miserable, wet and
muddy mess.
After negotiating one manzanita tunnel, Dennis
enjoyed a couple hundred yards of unobstructed travel before