A Different Kind of Game Room

“It’s either 9 feet, 6 inches, or nothing,” Denny tells his guide on day seven of a 10-day hunt in Alaska on Kodiak Island.

The large brown bear is sleeping in the brush.

Denny Boyer, casually dressed in a button-down flannel shirt and camouflage cap, reminds his guide, “When we see it, we don’t have to talk about anything. All you have to do is nod yes or no.”

A smaller bear would have had a real chance of running for its life. But not this sleeping giant.

On May 16, 1997, Denny spends the late day tracking a Kodiak bear with paws as big as the tires on  a four wheeler. He had shot two small grizzlies in Canada and one brown bear in western Alaska in previous hunts. “But ya’ know, they say you can't shoot a big one if you shoot a small one first,” he says, looking back at the odds of landing the bear of his dreams on the island.

The two men sit in a big drainage area and glass the hills between two mountains. Denny first sees the bear lumbering along the side of a hill. Harry, his guide, gives the okay. “Let’s go,” he says.

The men move in for a closer look but lose sight of it. An hour later, they turn around and go back to the area where they had seen the bear last. Denny starts to think that they have walked too far, but Harry, who is more familiar with the terrain, doesn’t think so.

“Harry, I think he’s back here,” Denny says, giving in to uncertainty.

“I don’t think so,” says Harry, looking through his pair of binoculars.

But then, in the near distance, he sees a patch of hair through a little opening. “There he is,” he says. “I see him now.”

“Where?” asks Denny.

Harry whispers, right there, and slowly raises his arm and points in the direction of the bear just 30 yards away. With nothing more for the men to do, they sit and wait.

It is almost midnight and the light of day is fading.

Three hours later, they think about throwing a rock and making some noise but just as the thought crosses their minds, the bear wakes up and walks out into the open.

Denny takes the safety off his Remington 700 BDL-375 H&H magnum caliber and looks at Harry, who is emphatically nodding his head back and forth.

The bear turns around and walks back into the brush, but a sudden shift in the wind puts the fear of man in him. “That wasn’t good,” Denny says. “He got a good whiff of us.”

He (the bear) bursts out of hiding and runs about 200 yards before stopping for a split second.

Denny, who had the cross hairs on him, pulled the trigger. “It sounded like a good hit,” Harry encouraged Denny, who ejected the spent shell and put another bullet in the chamber, as the bear breaks out again — running for its life over the next mountain. 

A HUNTER'S DREAM HOME

A long circular driveway — past a five-stall barn and manicured lawn — leads the way to Denny’s home in Wernersville. Out back, a densely wooded area, a native stone patio and a man-made creek add a touch of the great outdoors. Interior luxuries include cathedral ceilings, a large tiled foyer, a catwalk and a gourmet kitchen with a breakfast nook. It has three baths and four bedrooms, including a master suite with a bath and a laundry room. The 6,000-square-foot home, custom-designed by Denny, was put on paper by Kleckner Laucks Architects and built by Ciatto Construction Company.

His favorite room, a 900-square-foot Game Room, showcases memories of a lifetime of hunting. I asked Denny if a beautiful life-size elk in the room had that extra something when he shot it.

“I saw him and I liked him,” he says, smiling. “He looked good enough to me.”

He tells me he gets sentimental when he walks up to an animal just killed. It’s not about that, he says; hunting is about the experience: the people, different cultures and scenery.

And he doesn’t just shoot anything. “I’ve gone to Canada for whitetail deer at least 25 times and shot only six to seven bucks when I could have brought home more,” he says.

His best whitetail, shot in Alberta, Canada, is listed in the three-year Boone & Crocket book. According to their website at boone-crockett.org, the organization advocates for wildlife conservation and provides big game hunters with a scoring system.

Other notables in the room include seven caribou mounts: one from Alaska and six from parts of Canada including the Northwest Territories, northern Quebec, Newfoundland and Cambridge Bay.

A safari hunt for Great Plains animals — two impalas, a sable, kudu, steenbok, waterbuck, tsessebe and warthog — add a touch of the exotic. “The warthog,” Denny says, “is so ugly that it’s cute.”

There is a freeze-dried coyote — with its heart, liver, lungs, teeth and tongue still intact — from South Dakota, a stone sheep from British Columbia and a desert big horn from Mexico.

A 62-inch-wide moose head is mounted over a fireplace mantel. A handsome sitting area — outfitted with a leather love seat, two tapestry chairs, end tables and a wooden box filled with fat cigars — completes the space. 

He empties his gun, shooting at the bear, which is now about 400 yards away. He thinks that it might keep running. When it does collapse, he is both relieved and overcome by its size.

“I thought I had shot the Alaskan monument,” he says. “I honestly thought I was going to get in trouble.”

It is just about dark when the men finally tag the animal and snap a few pictures. Back at spike camp, they wait for the arrival of a second guide called in to help process the animal. The next day they go back and take its hide and skull and leave the rest for nature. Harry carries the skin, weighing more than 200 pounds, on his back for three miles. Two hours later, they sit in an outer plane and leave the island. The pilot flies over the area where the bear had been shot. Its carcass — barely visible now — is covered in bald eagles.

“There were about 70 of them eating our bear,” says Denny. “It was unbelievable.” 

At the Alaska Department of Fish and Game later that day, that feeling that he was in trouble comes back.

“You shot one of our bears,” the ranger told him.

Six weeks later, back at home, Denny receives a detailed letter in the mail with a map of the lake area and a history of the bear from the rangers who had been tracking it. He learned that in 1988 the bear was 8.5 years old and that it had been tranquilized and tattooed. It weighed in at 880 pounds and had been fitted with a radio collar. The map, covered in black dots, pinpointed exactly where the bear had traveled about on the island. The year he shot it, it had not hibernated.

Denny’s 1,400-pound bear was the biggest grizzly ever shot in Kodiak at the camp (where he had stayed) in its 26 years of outfitting in that region. It ranked 59th in the Boone & Crocket world record book.

Today, the Kodiak towers above 19 other life- size mounts for a total of 54, small and big game, in one room.

Originally published in Berks County Living, June 2014.

Photo provided by Denny Boyer