"He was in a sneak the whole time," Coffey said. "That's the best way I can describe it. He wouldn't lift his head, not even when he stopped to look up at me. Or at least that's what I think he did. He just sort of rolled his neck to the side, and it looked like he made eye contact. We had a staring match for the longest minute of my life!"

What Coffey didn't realize at the time was that the rack had a hooked drop tine sprouting from the backside that dug into the buck's neck whenever it tried to hold its head erect.

Eventually satisfied that nothing was amiss, the buck continued on to one of the scrapes to freshen it; it was 17 yards away from Coffey's quivering arms and arrow. Two strokes into its pawing, the buck was distracted by a sudden loud gurgling at the waterfall, and when it turned to look towards the sound, the hunter loosed his shaft.

Coffey was ready to panic -- but not the buck: It just calmly loped off with its tail up, as if nothing had happened.

"I about fell out of my tree," Coffey remembered with a grin. "I just sat down, reminding myself that I'd seen the green-and-white fletching bury behind his shoulder. Although I was confused by his tail being up, I knew that I'd hit him good.

"Then I finally remembered to breathe!"

Not waiting his customary 30 minutes after a shot, the archer hit the ground after only 10, detached his stand, recovered his blood-soaked arrow and went back to the truck. He made it home in record time, the usually 20-minute drive taking barely 10. He was eager to make two telephone calls: one to his brother, the other to a friend, Tony Myers.

"I wanted all the help and experience I could get," Coffey recalled. "Tony probably knows those woods better than anybody."

The trio returned later and tracked the deer for 85 yards before Myers' flashlight beam settled on the fallen monarch. "Tony's jaw hit the dirt," observed a laughing Coffey. "And that's saying something!" True enough: Myers has taken more than his share of bruiser whitetails inside Bankhead NF, two of which listed in the Alabama Whitetail Records.

Coffey still has a hard time believing that he actually arrowed the buck that would later be declared a state record by four scoring organizations. Even more remarkable is the fact that while most years find him three miles deep in the rugged country -- so far from a roadway that he usually passes on bucks that would make most hunters salivate -- he was almost in sight of his truck this time.

Although Coffey's well aware that the WMA and the "federal land" surrounding it conceal some beefy bucks sporting above-average antlers, he never expected to cross paths with one this big. Additionally, he had no clue that this buck was roaming the woods. Only one person, a man driving near there at night, reported having seen a plus-sized deer that may have been the 27-pointer that Coffey killed, and two years earlier, a shed that probably came from the same deer was found within a mile of the site of its demise.

When Randy harvested it, the 6 1/2-year-old buck was rut-weary. While it might have easily soared above the 200-pound mark during summer, it was down to about 180 when it fell to the bowhunter's arrow.

IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR
Amazingly, Coffey's wasn't the only world-class buck taken from the confines of Bankhead NF during the 2000 season. Three days before Coffey's triumph, Hartselle rifleman Ronald Laymon shot a giant 21-pointer; gross-scored at 222 5/8 points, it tallied a net score of 205 7/8 that put it at No. 6 in the B&C rankings for Alabama. A week before that, Steven Turner of Falkville, then 19 years old, was afield on the Winston County side of the forest when he downed a 20-pointer that grossed 177 4/8 points. And two days earlier, Shawn Padgett of Moulton took a typical 8-pointer with two small kickers that registered a gross score of 166 6/8 inches.