The closing chapter of a disturbing story

Nick Davis enters guilty plea

The last chapter in a story we wish had never come our way was written in late March in a courtroom in Dobson, a pretty little town that’s the county seat of Surry County.

An attorney entered a guilty plea for Nick Davis of Elkin to one count of taking a deer during a closed season. In return for his guilty plea, two related charges were dropped. A judge ordered Davis to pay $180 in court costs and a $604 replacement fee for the deer that was killed illegally. In addition, he revoked his hunting license for the next two years.

Davis was the young man who showed up the first week of archery season last September with an enormous non-typical buck with striking, white antlers that appeared to break the state record as the biggest non-typical buck ever taken by a North Carolina bowhunter — by more than 30 inches.

Measured by an official Pope & Young Club scorer, the buck scored more than 208 points, and after the required 60-day drying period, was sure to eclipse the state record.

The buck never made it 60 days. Within a week, enforcement officers with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission got Davis to confess that he’d made everything up.

According to officers, Davis admitted that the antlers were sheds purchased from a deer farm in Pennsylvania. He attached them to the skull of a small buck he killed with a rifle on the second day of archery season — hence the charge for taking a deer out of season — and then posed for photographs with the buck in the back of a pickup truck at his place of business and began the process of notifying people he had killed the pending state-record, non-typical archery buck.

Investigating officers said the trickery involved in getting a set of enormous antlers on the skull of a deer that originally carried a tiny, tiny rack — obviously a 1 1/2-year-old buck — was so well done and camouflaged that they understood how the scorer hadn’t been able to see it.

“He didn’t learn to do this by watching a video on You Tube,” is how one officer described it to me. In fact, it wasn’t until after Davis had confessed and showed the officers his handiwork they could even tell the horns didn’t belong.

It remains interesting to me, after almost 40 years in the newspaper and magazine business, how wildlife and fisheries cases are treated in various courtrooms. I’ve sat in court to watch dozens of wildlife-related cases and been amazed at how little attention they receive from judges and prosecutors. Sometimes, I’ve wondered why officers even bothered to bring charges when fines offenders received didn’t even qualify as slaps on the wrist or when folks who were cited for fishing without a license had their cases dismissed when they showed up with a newly purchased license.

This time, it appears the judge got it right.