The King Blacktail

Story of a Great buck from the past.
By Nondy Weaver

Dennis King is a good friend of mine. One fine 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 finally 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. 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 first 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 encountering another one. Twenty-five 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 rifle securely to his shoulder, so he more or less sighted down the barrel of his .30-06 and fired, 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 fired his round. Following the splayed track of mud, they worked their way down the hill for approximately fifty 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 officially 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 figures he probably won maybe four or five of those hundreds of attempts. The deer won all the rest. And, you know, Dennis wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tags: Blacktail, HI33, Nondy Weaver

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