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School holidays hunt. My sons first wallaby
Having a week of during the holidays I asked Josh, my younger son if he'd like to come out for a hunt with me. Now getting him off his phone and Xbox and out of the house is a great achievement for a start so I was pretty stoked when he agreed to wake up early and head out to the hills.
Although I got him up early, speed in getting out the door still evaded our efforts and by the time we got to the carpark the sun was already above the horizon and shining brightly on the hills ahead.
We made our way up the easement in good time and ran into a couple of guys who were sitting in the tussock glassing the surrounding country.
After a quick chat about where they wanted to hunt they said they were already as far as they were going for the day.
We left them there and continued up further into the block and stopped at the next decent glassing spot. After a bit of looking we were about to move on when I spotted movement low on the opposite ridge. The first animal had been spotted, a lone wallaby feeding on the dotted patches of grass amongst the face of scrub.
I asked Josh if he wanted to take the shot and with slight hesitancy in his ability he said yeah, ok.
We moved down the face to shorten the distance and get a clear shot through the tussock at 125m. Setting up the .223 over the pack and getting Josh comfortable with the scope on 3x I asked him if he could see the wallaby. When steady I wound the power up to 6x and closed the bolt telling Josh that he can take the shot when he's ready.
When the shot cracked from the rifle I heard a good thud as the wallaby bounded sideways into the thick scrub. Being his first animal that was bigger than a hare we decided to see if we could find it for a photo, back up the face and around the track we dropped off the pack at the top of the spur and made our way down.
Firstly steep and grassy the going was easy as long as we kept a careful watch for the evil spaniard grass dotted around in places. Finding where the wallaby was sitting was really easy as it was right next to a full flowering kowhai tree. Searching the ground I found blood and knowing what way it initially moved made finding the next drop fairly easy.
We slowly bashed our way across the face through waist high crown fern sighting patches of blood every metre or so on the ground and foliage.
After around 20 metres I found it deep in the ferns, without the blood we would have never had a chance of finding it.
I dragged it up and managed to get a photo of Josh and a pat on the back from me. I'm sure glad it wasn't a deer we were needing to butcher in that area. Would have been a difficult task.
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We made our way back the way we had come and by the top of the ridge Josh said he was tired and didn't want to head any further up the hills. We walked back down the track to the closest creek and stopped for a feed of cheese and crackers, 2 minute noodles and a cuppa soup. It was a great moment just sitting there in the shade next to a waterfall relaxing with Josh and chatting about random stuff.
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Packing up we made our way back down the track and off home. Only a short trip but we managed to find and shoot the only animal we saw for the day.
