Thread: Teaching a new dog new tricks

I whistled a few times and James shouted ‘stand up you lazy bugger’, after a couple of minutes of various insults he stood to a whistle, the .284 cracked and it feel to the ground.

On the way around to pick up James’s fallow I saw another red stag about 350 yards away and James agreed to carry on by himself, while Ben and I dropped down another ridge to have a look for the red stag I’d just spotted. We sat on a grass clearing for an hour and a bit and saw another two deer, including one red stag right up where we’d first been glassing. James returned with his fallow and we glassed for another half an hour. We decided to move back up the ridge and see if we could find the stag that I’d seen up there.

We headed back up the ridge and when we were around 275 yards away from the clearing, we spotted him again laying down, without a care in the world. I dialed the .260 up 1.7 MOA and was in the process to dialing up the .284 for James when we heard a shot from behind us, about 500 yards away. ‘We better hurry up’ I said and gently squeezed the trgger and sent a 124 Hammer Hunter on its way. The stag jumped up and ran about 4 meters, wobbled around and fell over!
We packed up all our gear and trekked back up the ridge and then down to the stag. The 124 Hammer had done quite a lot of damage, we fully intended to open it up nd have a good look, but as the bullet had angled into the chest, it didn’t look too flash south of the diaphragm so we just kicked the boned out body down the hill.

We sat around admiring the view and talking smack, while the meat cooled down. Having James with us meant Ben and I only had to carry a boned out back leg each! Back up through the bush, we bashed, until we hit the track. We cruised off back to the ute, arriving at 10:30pm and bumping into the shot firer, who was going to sleep in his car and try for another deer the following day, I rated his chances as there was plenty around.

I’ll try and get out for a couple of more hunts this year, it’s been a great year, with plenty of adventure with some bloody good mates.