Thread: Last hunt with a good mate till September.....

Finally crawled out of the scratcher about 8am checked my mates tent and oddly he was gone but his rifle was still there......
A bit odd so I waited and called out quietly in case he was shitting behind a bush somewhere
Finally I spied him.a few hundred yards away just as he crested a ridge towards where we planned on spending the morning glassing.
I thought to myself "with no rifle what's he gonna do shoot them with his cock ?"
Anyway I put my boots on grabbed my rifle, binos, jet cooker, coffee sachet and some water and set off after him double time.
I caught up to him and queried him on his current predicament of being at our glassing point but un armed.
He said that I was sleeping so soundly he assumed I had already gone up ahead so didn't bring his rifle as mine was more than enough.
Anyway I set about making coffee whilst my mate got to work glassing.
Well soon enough he pipes up "got one but you better not piss about it's a 2 stepper" (a 2 stepper is a deer that is in the scrub and could disappear in 2 steps). Dunno if anyone else calls em that ?
Anyway I said can you range it and I'll dial up and smoke it ? "Bugger I lost it" he replies.
We sat there and continued glassing as we knew that the deer/s would likely feed out into the open if we didn't spook it.
Sure enough as I'm enjoying the mornings brew he pipes up "I've got it again and another one".
Quickly I got him to talk me onto them so I could keep an eye on them whilst he ranged them.
They looked a reasonable distance away across a valley and my mate confirmed 369 yards, I quickly plugged the numbers into my ballistics calc and dialed up the solution.
Once dialed up it took me a minute to find them again but once on target I confirmed I was ready to shoot and asked my mate to spot the shot.
He confirmed he was ready and described what the deer was doing.....unbeknownst to us both deer must have been doing the same thing quartering away looking back over its shoulder
I took the shot and was able to actually watch the shot hit and sack the red on the spot....just as well as my mate calls out "it hadn't gone down and shoot it again" well I was somewhat perplexed as sure as day I was looking at 1 very dead deer through my scope and at 20x zoom I was extremely confident....a short time after he tells me "too late it's gone" so I lined him up behind my scope and guided him to 1 very dead deer partially obscured by a rock but definitely a deer.
Well we both laughed he had been watching the wrong bloody deer
Anyway easy part done my prize lay a long way off at the bottom of a all too familiar ridge.
I knew what we were in for as I shot my first red spiker further up that ridge about a year and a half earlier.
Anyway we packed up and made off for the tops to drop down the ridge from the other side as it was easier to drop down the open tussok face than to push through unknown scrub to retrieve it.

The pink dot shows where the deer was this pic was taken from where I took the shot.