5 Attachment(s)
Mongrel stags in mongrel country
After poring over maps for a fair whack of time and hoping my preferred area of the Northern Ruahines wouldn’t get 1080’d I found out the drop was postponed.
I had looked at a series of faces from various angles on different trips for four years and I figured it was high time I pushed in there and found out what it was like on the ground. I knew it would be a full days walk off track to get in there and so I sought out some advice from an experienced local. It turned out he knew the broader area very well, and had the same thoughts I had and thought it worth investigating.
So my plan was settled, four nights chasing stags a long way from the car with dog in tow. Three hours after leaving the car it was time to head off piste and I was soon questioning my choice as it turned out to be a real shit of a traverse through head high hard fern , mingimingi and cutty grass with deer trails only being intermittent as I went up and down for the next five hours, crossing multiple creek heads that promised doom if I put a foot wrong.
With half an hour to spare I arrived handy to a small creek and set a comfy camp to ride out the rain and gales predicted for the following day. However in the mad scrub bash I’d lost my roaring horn from the side of my pack somewhere in there.
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The weatherman was fairly accurate as it blew like stink the whole night with nil roaring heard over the dreaded flap of the fly on its moorings.
I didn’t have much of a plan the next morning, just find some noise and go to it. Cutting up the creek towards the tops I had two going up above me on spurs I was uncomfortable climbing. However, a bit of caution was applied and I had finally found some deer trails to move around on. I roared a couple of times and all of a sudden one of the stags was lower down, by a long way.
I decided to shut up and see what happened as I dragged my sorry self up the side of the spur amongst the cutty grass at a rate of almost backwards.
The cutty grass vibrated above me as the stag roared from close range. It was too steep to get a good look but I knew he was coming so hind called once. That brought him in a bit quicker, and I spied some stick like antlers pitched at a crazy angle as he picked his way down the near vertical face. As he stepped off the spur he stopped behind yet more head high scrub and with him off the skyline and having positively identified him as a stag I waited for the extra step. Sure enough he took it, exposing his head and shoulders and roared , where I promptly shot him in the shoulder at about twenty metres.
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At the shot gravity took over and he cartwheeled down and stopped, thrashing. It took me ten minutes to get to him, and I found an ancient five pointer, with four on one side and a stake on the other. He’d stopped right on the edge of a significant slip and I had no idea how I was going to move him for butchering. I took backsteaks and when I attempted to take his back legs I lost my grip and he disappeared off the edge of the slip in a shower of stones. That gave me the shits so back down I went on the exact path I came up , as at least I knew I could move on it!
I was happy but what a mongrel stag and what a place to get him.
Spent the rest of the day in the sleeping bag hiding away from the weather and hoping for a better evening.
Evening came and I tried a different tack, climbing onto a small terrace below camp, finding stag sign everywhere but heard minimal roaring until I turned and faced the country I had shot the stag in that morning.
There were deer there alright and going very well, and they had every reason to hide up in the shit bush surrounding them, being tough to hunt due to steepness.
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Back to camp I went and resolved to find a way in there the next day.
Up at sparrows the next morning and packed for a full day exploring the upper faces above camp to the main range. I climbed past the spot where I’d lost the stag to find three more roaring above me and to the side of the spur I was on. It got narrower and narrower as I climbed and the dog took me across the faces on the exact paths that the resident stags had taken.
When I roared they would reply and as I crossed their threshold they would shut down. After a morning of this I felt defeated so dropped back to the creek on a flatter trail, where I roared too close to an unseen stag. He replied instantly but followed up with the quiet grunting of him pushing a hind away. I started running to catch up and glimpsed an ok set of antlers above the head high hard fern for a few seconds and nothing else.
I gave up on noise at that point and followed the dog around for the rest of the day. I got a look back into the area I’d hunted that morning and it was sobering viewing. I was sidling between slips without even knowing it.
The dog took me on a circuit, eventually led me back to that very same creek crossing towards dark and indicated a spiker above the creek. This was a good opportunity to redeem the loss of that stag (and his back legs) so I shot the spiker and took what I could. 2 deer on board and I was thrilled.
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At camp that night I elected to leave the next day, with the weather looking to turn worse and a big walk out ahead with a decent load of meat I was happy enough with my efforts.
The last day was spent making my way up, down and across to the river flats, and my car. I dropped off a ridge into a bowl shaped gully on a roar only to find the stag was a poor animal and was in yet more hard fern and rubbish. He decided to leave me alone, and he wasn’t worth the mission into the hovel he had made home in any case.
A bit later and half a km above the river with the bush really starting to turn mongrel, I heard the clatter of an animal escaping through the mingimingi. I immediately hind called and the scrub started shaking closer and closer until another spiker shouldered his way on top of my position and copped a bullet to the head for his curiosity. I paced out three steps and there he was, shot at the grand distance of three metres!
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I barely had room to swing a cat where I was standing but added his legs and steaks to my pack. In the confines of the mingimingi I couldnt repack to add the meat to the bottom of the pack so elected to wrap it and pack it high up in the pack.
This was to be my undoing as my route just got steeper and thicker with the top heavy pack wanting to snag and pull every obstacle it could. The last 100m into the river was nerve wracking with the spur being a metre wide and I seriously contemplated throwing the pack off the ridge into the river and finding a way down sans pack.
Lucky for me I sent the dog in front and he found our down to the main river where upon hitting flat ground I gave the biggest rock in the creek bed a big kiss in relief!
8 hrs and 45 minutes after leaving camp that morning I was back at my truck with an exceedingly heavy pack having explored some mongrel country and taken a few animals.
Would I go back there? I probably would.
