Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 2, 1995 TAG: 9510020100
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Ugly rumors began the day she checked a huge 16-point buck at a big-game station during last year's bowhunting season.
``When I went over to the taxidermist, there were two guys in there,'' said Boone, who is 27. ``One said, `How bad did it tear your vehicle up?' That bothered me.''
Boone's husband, Tim, got a call from his grandmother that night.
``She had heard stuff over in the Pilot area,'' he said. ``They just kept on, the craziest stuff I've ever heard.''
They included reports the deer had been spotlighted at night, then checked in as a legitimate bow kill.
Some said that Tim had killed the buck and had his wife claim it because he didn't have a hunting license.
``If I'd killed a deer like that, she ain't going to check it in,'' he said.
There also were rumors the deer had been killed in West Virginia, that when taxidermist Dewayne Linkous of Blacksburg mounted it, a bullet fell out of one of its ear.
That didn't happen, said Linkous.
``Three game wardens checked the deer at the shop and they determined it was a legal bow kill,'' he said.
Wardens also came to Boone's home.
``He asked me this and that and if the deer had been spotlighted and would I take a lie-detector test, and I said I would,'' said Melissa Boone. ``He asked me to shoot my bow, and I said, `Fine,' and I shot at 35 yards. That was the worst injustice, when they came and said, `We heard you don't even own a bow. Or you couldn't pull one back.' I just wanted to rub it in. I said, `I'm going to show them what I can do.'''
The word was that Boone, who stands 5 feet tall and weighs about 100 pounds, wasn't physically capable of shooting a hunting bow.
Warden John Hall discounted that.
``I watched her shoot,'' he said. ``She had no difficulty pulling it back and putting it in the bull's-eye. As far as our investigation went, there was nothing illegal about it.''
In time, rumors spread that there were 13 charges against Boone and that someone was going to testify against her in court.
``I told them, `fine, prove it,''' she said. ``When you would confront them with the stuff, they would drop it.''
Boone knew her buck was the kind that should be toted to a trophy deer show, but with all the grief she was catching, she considered not entering it.
``But I killed it and I feel like I deserved a chance just like everybody else did,'' she said.
``She deserved a handshake instead of a slap-around,'' Tim Boone added.
In Williamsburg, at the recent Virginia State Big Game Trophy Show, the buck scored 217 4/16. That put it at the top of the class for 1994-95 bow-killed bucks 12 points and above.
When Boone walked up to pick up her trophy plaque from Becky Norton Dunlop, secretary of the Department of Natural Resources, she received the loudest applause of the day.
Why had the road to Williamsburg been so rough?
``Because I am a woman,'' she said. ``I think the biggest part is jealousy. That is the biggest deer killed in that area for a good while, and people can't stand it that I got it and not them.''
Boone reported killing the deer from a tree stand at the edge of an alfalfa field just after daylight. She said Tim was home in bed with a bad back and a cold, and was keeping an eye on their 1-year-old son, Zachary.
``When I got up to the stand, it was still dark,'' she said. ``I heard something come up under my stand before daylight.
Just after daylight, the buck approached her stand, while following the edge of the alfalfa, she said.
``I almost missed him, actually,'' she said. ``I hit him in the back.''
When she ran to the house, she said Tim didn't believe her at first.
``I was still in bed,'' he said. ``She said she had knocked down a big, old buck and counted 13 or 14 points. I said, `Get out of here. Leave me alone.'''
Controversy has become commonplace in the world of trophy hunting. In 1992, when Jim Smith of Luray killed a 31-point buck the first day of muzzleloading season in Warren County, the rumors grew so bad that he said he wished he hadn't told anyone about the deer.
Word spread that Smith had killed it while poaching on the Shenandoah National Park, that he had cut the fence at the National Zoological Park Conservation and Research Center on the outskirts of town and killed a buck that had been shot full of steroids.
An investigation by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries didn't turn up any wrongdoing, and Smith's buck went into the record book as the biggest deer ever killed in Virginia, with a score of 296. It is the No.1 buck in the black powder national records.
When Mike Weaver of Bassett took several trophy buck heads to a big-game show in Richmond a couple of years ago, someone used a spray can of paint to write ``Poacher'' on his vehicle.
North American Whitetail Magazine came close to pulling a story on the trophy hunting tactics of Charles Nichols of Roanoke when the editor received a call this summer from a reader who claimed Nichols kills most of his bucks by illegal means. Following an investigation, the story ran.
The editor, Gordon Whittington, said charges of illegal activities have become commonplace in the world of trophy hunting.
``When you kill a big deer, I figure someone would be happy for you, but they aren't,'' said Nichols, who was back at the big-game show in Williamsburg with an 11-point buck that was Virginia's all-time trophy for bow-killed bucks nine to 11 points. ``I would say 80 percent of the people are jealous,'' he said.
Controversy also surrounded the top bear in the Williamsburg show, a Rockingham County trophy killed by Roger Wyant. The bow-killed bear scored 31 2/16, which ranked it first in the state record book.
``Anytime you break a record, you always have a bunch of comments on it,'' said Boyd Skelton, a spokesman for the Rockingham-Harrisonburg Chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America, one of the sponsors of the state's trophy show.
Max Carpenter, a retired Virginia game biologist who scores for Boone and Crockett, the national score keepers, was satisfied the bear was killed when and where it was reported, said Skelton.
by CNB