Thread: After work hunt

Last night I went out for a hunt after work with the same mate who shot the stag last week.

We drove over the back and seeing no other vehicles anywhere parked in a spot near to where we wanted to go, it was raining and blowing at the car but the skies looked like they would be clearing.

We walked for a couple of hours to where we knew there was likely to be some reds and sat down in the waist high tussock to glass the faces we could see. About 3/4 hour before last light we heard the first roar and soon spotted the stag across the valley, he was crossing a side valley and although he stopped and roared back at us he wouldn't come any closer and just carried on up the ridge. He didn't have any Hinds so we let him go as I was preferring to get a meat animal if I could.

Only a few minutes after losing sight of him another stag roared behind us, this one sounded much closer and on our side of the valley. It took a few minutes to spot him and again he had no Hinds, he also only had one antler so I decided that I would try and take him out of the gene pool.

We watched him come down the ridge and responding to roars, then at the last minute he started moving away from us, another roar and he stopped, turned and started coming on again. I got ready and soon had him in my crosshairs while my mate kept the glasses on him. I slowly eased back on the trigger and with a crack and a solid thud I knew I had mate a hit, the stag went down and didn't move, we stayed watching for a few minutes then moved out.

Crossing the 150m to where the stag should be it was now fully dark with no moon yet and annoyingly no stag either, we searched high and low for over an hour and found nothing, nothing at all yet we had both seen him go down. Eventually we just had to admit defeat and head for home, the walk back down the valley in the almost full moon was just amazing.

So I shot my first ever deer which turned out to be a stag but have nothing to prove it, so for now I'm not counting it and will continue trying after Easter as a) I'm off to Nelson for family stuff and b) the weather forecast for around here is crap.