By Scott Bestul

Remember Illinois hunter Chris Kiernan? Back in November of 2009, he killed an Illinois state-record nontypical whitetail, a 36-point buck giant that netted scored 267-3/8 inches. This week, Kiernan pleaded guilty in Grundy County (IL) Circuit Court to illegally taking not just that buck but two others as well, according to this story in the LaSalle News Tribune.

By Dave Hurteau

I got the phone call on Friday and spent the weekend not really believing it. But Monday’s usual slap hit like a club, and there’s no getting around the brutally sad truth that Guthrie, as everyone called him, is gone—died in his sleep Friday morning, leaving his wife and two young children.

Known best for his work with Petersen’s Hunting, Guns & Ammo, Shooting Times, and a variety of other titles, as well as Guns & Ammo TV, Guthrie had just begun doing stuff for F&S, including the March feature story “The 1,000-Yard Shot,” which he and I worked on together. I was hoping he’d do much more for us down the road, because he was very, very good, and because I liked him, and I think you—F&S’s readers—would have liked him, too.

By Dave Hurteau

Two quick notes before we get stared: first you can click here if you missed Part 1, and second, for anyone who’d like to flatly call me a hypocrite or anything else, I invite you to do so in the comment section below, and don’t feel like you have to read the story first. 
Okay. Here we go.

A Real Hunt
Taking several shots to check the zero on the .45-70, I threw one way high. On a Texas nilgai hunt, you shoot standing off sticks in the African tradition (even though nilgai are Asian). Noticing the flyer, Sports Afield Editor Diana Rupp, with whom I was hunting and who shoots standing off sticks far more often than I do, pointed out that with this method there’s a tendency to shoot high if you’re not careful to hold the fore-end down on the sticks. "Okay," I said, and we went hunting.

Nilgai were introduced on the King Ranch in the 1920s as a game species and supplemental food source for the cowboys. But the ranch’s low fence, designed to keep cattle in, does not prevent wildlife from getting out, and today about 30,000 free-ranging, wild nilgai roam various portions of south Texas, including about 10,000 of them on the King Ranch. What’s striking is how these huge, exotic beasts vanish so naturally into the scraggly branches of mesquite and live oaks—almost like they evolved here.

By Scott Bestul

When a poacher apologizes, it’s usually before a judge who is about to throw the book at him. But a Montana man who illegally shot three whitetail does more than 40 seasons ago not only turned himself in, he forked over a fine no one asked him to pay. According this story by Rich Landers, the man contacted the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department recently and confessed to shooting the deer during the 1969 and 1970 hunting seasons.

Capt. Richard Mann, with the enforcement division of WFWD, informed the Montana man—whom Mann refers to only as “Roy”—that the statute of limitations for the offense had run out years ago, and encouraged him to consider volunteer service to the department if his conscience still bothered him. Distance made volunteering problematic, so Roy wrote the WDFW a $6,000 check instead. The maximum penalty for poaching antlerless deer in Washington right now is close to $2,000 per animal.