Thread: Roar Mistakes that are still Raw

Because there has been no proper Roar hunting this year the following blundering error cuts deep !

The Saturday eve prior to 'lockdown' my apprentice hunter - a friends 14 yr old son and I were on a hill face glassing and listening as a bit of a recon. for a Sunday hunt.

A stag roared on the other side of the river about 1 km North of us. As it was a half hour to dark and nothing else had been seen we jumped into the vehicle and drove down off the hill and round to where we could easily walk over a big knob and roar across at the stag. I explained to H that because the stag was not roaring much we would balance our roaring with his and not excitedly answer immediately when we heard a roar. The stag was moving a bit so we decided that if we could get him to come out of the bush and show himself on a prominent knob on a slip we could still shoot him there. In any case we could entertain ourselves with some practice. We roared and then moved 100 metres around the face, during which time the stag replied, we would then reply again, but now from a different spot, hopefully leading the stag to the slip. After three moves we were in the right spot and I explained to H that my roars had been made to sound like a lesser stag than the one roaring across the river. I then got a blade of grass and started to squeak like a fawn, then a couple of hind mews and after a couple of minutes a couple of roars to sound like a young teenage stag. This I explained would have the stag saying to himself " well how about that, the young prick over the river has got a girlfriend, I'll get over there, punch him on the nose and he can watch while I shag her". We waited, the stag wouldn't move to the slip although we did hear a deer in the river about 8:30. We got side-tracked counting Elon Musk's satellites at one every 23 seconds and then at 9 pm I looked across at Tui who was on the other side of the big Kanuka we were sitting each side of and whispered to H " Is that dog locked up ?" "Yes" - "Pass me the rifle". No sooner did I have the rifle in hand and there was a great Thudding of hooves on the tussock right in front of us equivalent to six heavy steers running past. Crap! "Well that was a fuck up of high order" I sighed, we turned on our very powerful - dazzle and shoot a stag at 15 paces no trouble at all headlamps - and trudged back ...