Sometimes you wonder what hold a big whitetail buck has over a hunter. Some of us stay up nights thinking about that big 10-pointer in our trail-camera photos, figuring out ways to put him on the wall over our fireplace. I sometimes lie awake thinking about the shots I’ve missed over the 45 years since I stared deer hunting as a 14-year-old.
So I understand that big bucks will make a lot of adults do crazy things. But like a lot of people, I can’t begin to fathom what Elkin’s Nick Davis was thinking when he cooked up a plan to kill a state-record deer — or make people think he did.
Davis’ story is probably known by every deer hunter in North Carolina by now. To summarize: Davis, who grew up in East Bend, apparently bought a huge set of non-typical shed antlers from a deer farm in Pennsylvania. Nothing wrong so far. He brought them back to North Carolina. Nothing wrong yet.
Shortly after bow season opened, he allegedly killed a small buck with a rifle. That would make him a poacher, but what followed was likely even worse. He apparently sawed off that buck’s tiny 3-point rack and replaced it with his out-of-state antlers, attaching them to the smaller buck’s skull so expertly that it was undetectable. Then, he started taking photos.
He e-mailed two images to the CEO of the company that publishes North Carolina Sportsman, including this message: “Didn’t know if you are interested, but I bagged a buck that beat the current state record by a mile today.” He got an official scorer with the N.C. Bowhunters Association to measure the rack. He posted a photo on his Facebook page that drew a lot of notice. Quickly, he went from suspected poacher to big liar.
From the magazine, background phone calls were made to people from the Yadkin County community where he grew up. They told the same story: Great kid. Upstanding. Believe him — he’d never lie about that. When interviewed, Davis told a story about using a homemade mineral supplement to lure in a huge buck that he killed with a bow and arrow.
Almost 100,000 people read the NorthCarolinaSportsman.com story in two days. Then, Davis’s story began to unravel. People started calling game wardens, saying the antlers were too big to be true. One officer did a background check on Davis’s past hunting activities and found no evidence that a big buck he said he killed in 2014, the photo of which was also on his Facebook page, had ever been tagged and reported. Suspicious, they interviewed Davis four days after he went public, and he cracked and reportedly admitted he’d made it all up.
Davis has been charged with four wildlife violations for things he did wrong leading up to the big lie. He couldn’t be charged with his hoax; one officer told me, “It’s not against the law to lie.” If convicted, he might wind up paying a substantial fine, maybe lose his hunting license. One thing he can’t do is pay people to forget that he’s a liar. Hopefully, that lie will follow him for a while.
Like forever.
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