king' s outdoor world - Index

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

encountering another one. Twenty-fi ve feet of crawling
later, with no end in sight, Dennis heard a shot ring out close
by. Being an optimist, Dennis assumed that Charley had
bagged the buck and that his miserable upward crawl was
at a merciful end. Carefully, he stood up in the only place
he could and breathed a sigh of relief. At that moment, the
brush started popping and cracking uphill. Dennis quietly
crouched back down and looked farther into the manzanita
tunnel. There was the buck, barreling down the trail and
coming directly at him! The brush prevented Dennis from
pulling his rifl e securely to his shoulder, so he more or less
sighted down the barrel of his .30-06 and fi red, just ten feet
in front of the buck, who continued his descent past Dennis.
Dennis could hear the buck running through the brush for
quite a while, which made him sick at the prospect of having
hit the buck badly. While Dennis was worrying about the
shot, Charley yelled to him from above. There was nothing
else to do, so Dennis kept climbing up the trail to meet his
friend in the clearing.
Once Charley and Dennis had regrouped, they stood
awhile to take a break, catch their breath and discuss the
situation. As it turned out, Charley had gotten close enough
to see the deer through the mist and rain. He took an off-hand
shot as the buck was about to enter the brush. At the sound of
the shot, the buck exploded downhill right into Dennis’ lap.
The two men slid down through the deer tunnels to where
Dennis had fi red his round. Following the splayed track of
mud, they worked their way down the hill for approximately
Dennis King holding the mount of his great
record Oregon blacktail deer taken in 1970
fi fty yards where they found a pretty good smear of blood
on a dead manzanita tree. Further down the hill, more blood
appeared as they kept on the track. Finally, they found the
dead buck and excitedly exchanged congratulations.
Once Dennis and Charley got the buck back to
Dennis’s shop, they pulled the buck inside and started
cleaning the mud, blood, and gore off of him and themselves.
That was when they actually slowed down long enough to
take a good look at the animal. He was gorgeous - with a
nearly perfect symmetrical rack. The buck had great tine
length, long main beams, good eye guards and great bases.
The body size was extra large for a blacktail and he was just
beautiful to look at. The two men both couldn’t quite get
enough. Dennis and Charley knew the buck would score
high in the record book, but didn’t know how high until
the required drying time had elapsed. Dennis had the buck
offi cially scored at 171 7/8 gross and 170 2/8 net; this places
him as the #2 in Oregon. Thirty-six years have passed and
the King buck stands as the third largest recorded typical
blacktail in Oregon and #6 overall in the Boone and Crockett
Club’s record books.
Looking back over nearly forty years of trying
to outwit blacktails, Dennis still believes that they had
some extraordinary luck that day. In fact, over the course
of all those years, and several hundred attempts to outwit
blacktails, Dennis fi gures he probably won maybe four or
fi ve of those hundreds of attempts. The deer won all the rest.
And, you know, Dennis wouldn’t have it any other way.
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