Louis Locke says he was on Cloud Nine after he shot a buck with a tremendous rack in November 2014. But he might've been even more excited than he admitted, according to his wife.
"When he called, I couldn't understand a word he was saying," Karmen Locke said, adding that her husband was dropping consonants as if he were reciting the list of Hawaiian islands.
"He was saying, 'Ioaieeer, Iotaigdeer ... eigeer ... eauiul, eally.' Finally, I asked him to slow down, that I couldn't understand a word," she continued. "And, still, all I got was 'I-otta-ig-eer, blah, blah, blah.'
"I didn't know what on earth he was talking about until my son offered a partial translation: big deer," she added.
At that point, Karmen knew Louis was not going to be in the audience during her choral concert that night, even though he'd promised to be there.
Of course that would be the day - the evening - he'd connect with the biggest buck he'd seen on the 80 acres he hunts in Sedgwick County, Kansas. He'd been hoping to get a poke at it ever since he saw the first trail camera photograph of the whitetail two years earlier.
He'd nicknamed it Tall Tines.
"I began my all-day hunts that year on Nov. 6. I couldn't get military leave before that," Louis told me. "I decided to take 10 days off and planned on hunting Tall Tines exclusively.
"I saw him on the 7th at 50 yards, the first time I'd seen him on the hoof, and I could not stop shaking. It's probably a good thing that a doe led him away from me," he said. "I don't think I would have been able to stay steady enough to shoot him."
Louis was slightly more composed on Saturday, or at least he was before taking the shot with his bow. Afterward is when he called Karmen and demonstrated his superb command of vowels.
The typical 13-pointer did indeed wear tall tines, four of them surpassing the foot-long mark. Its BTR composite score is 200 1/8 inches.