By Gordon Whittington
Unless your name happened to be Milo Hanson , it was hard to get much notice for the whitetail you shot in western Canada in 1993. On Nov. 23 of that year, Milo and his Winchester shattered the world record for typical antlers, felling the 213 5/8-inch behemoth that still rules the B&C record book. Every other buck shot that fall naturally took a back seat to him.
But Milo was hardly the only person to shoot a huge-framed whitetail in western Canada that season. In fact, one province to the west, whitetail hunter Keith Dahmer had done the same thing, shooting a colossal buck with a net typical frame of 213 7/8 inches. The deer is big all over, with great beams, four tines of 12 inches or longer and great mass. The 14 abnormal points add up to 42 6/8 inches but don’t interfere with the overall typical look. This is a stately rack that will stand out on any wall.
So why is the Dahmer buck largely unknown? Yes, he was shot in the same year as the Hanson world record, but another problem perhaps was even worse: Keith couldn’t find the dead deer. He looked and looked but couldn’t find it.
Finally, the next April someone else stumbled onto the remains and gave the rack back to him. It’s not listed in B&C at all, much less as a hunter kill, but it’s been scored at 256 5/8 net. That number makes it one of Alberta’s most elite bucks ever — and if you’re elite there, you’re elite anywhere.
Tragically, Keith lived to be only 43 before dying in a fall in a construction accident there in western Alberta. But at least his name lives on in whitetail history, if not to the extent it might have had the hunter actually found his great deer in a timely manner.
