Thread: My Apprentice Hunter

Yesterday mum needed some time to herself to finish off an assignment for her post grad studies, so being a nice day, Lachie and I decided we'd go on a bit of an adventure to kill the afternoon.

We geared up and headed up the hill in the truck, only to get to our hunting spot to find it was spitting rain and windy as. There was still a fair bit of snow around which kept the air temp low. We had a banana and a milk and contemplated what we were going to do. The weather started to clear so we thought, bugger it, and got organised. We'd done a fair bit of pre-training over the last couple of months, so it was time to put what we'd learnt into practice.



A quick wander down into a sheltered gully where we thought animals might like to be tucked away from the wind, and we were soon looking for deer. Nothing seen, and Pip showed no interest so we moved on. This happened a few times until finally Pip started winding and sure enough through my binos I spotted a couple of deer bedded down in the scrub.

The stalk was on, Pip went into sneak mode and Lach thought this was pretty funny, giggling away in the back pack constantly. No amount of "shoosh mans" could keep him quiet. We stopped to put his earmuffs on, I hoped they would shut him up, but alas, he just laughed louder!



Anyway, the wind in our face proved to be steady enough to allow us to sneak within 80yds of the deer and pick one of the tastiest ones out to take home with us. As I lined up on the deer, Lach was wriggling from side to side, trying to get a look at the four deer looking at us, I'll blame him for the first shot miss as I squeezed off on a high neck shot. A quick reload and the deer cartwheeled with a base of the neck shot before it'd taken three steps.

We clambered through the bush lawyer filled gully and made our way up to the deer. A quick photo session - I've learnt babies don't have a hell of a lot of patience for that type of carry on, then a butchering session where we got blood all over ourselves, and we loaded up for the carry out. We discovered that Macpac baby carriers have plenty of space for back-steaks and a couple of boned out hindquarters! Bonus.





Both dog and Lachie snored their heads off all the way home, and thankfully Mum was finished her assignment when we got back because I needed a beer and a sit down - next time we'll try to find one closer to the truck ;D

Cheers
Josh