Teaching a new dog new tricks

I’d taken Friday off work with the sole plan of heading into the hills, maybe over night. My son and a mate wanted to come and James wanted to bring his pup so an easy walk, close to home was chosen.
We play the game ‘guess how many cars are in the car park’ as we drive down the road as a couple of wann be famous youtubers have been displaying miles too much information recently and the place is the busiest it’s been in the 25 years I’ve been hunting it. I was wrong, but relieved that there was only two cars in the car park and not a single footprint on the track as we walked into the first glassing spot.
Ten minutes up the track we dropped off the track md I showed the lads a great glassing spot for a quick after work hunt, it didn’t take me long to spot a flow at 900 yards and it took James less time to work out that he didn’t want his pup on a leash!
We kept walking for another 40 or so minutes where we pulled into another glassing spot and I spotted a red at a little over 900 yards, by now it was around 5:00pm and still very hot. We wandered up the track and dumped our packs and sat down for a good glass. Around ten minutes later Ben spotted a fallow over 1000 yards away and then another only 570 yards away, prior to moving down the ridge to take a shot, he spotted another red, so we thought we’d shoot both of them.
By the time we got down to a good shooting spot the fallow buck HD sat down and we couldn’t get a good angle on the red, from the same spot. James lined up the resting fallow with my Tikka .284 and I pointed my Tikka .260 in the same direction.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Easy work :cool:

Nice one Craig..but that wannabe is an elite sniper….Bahaha

Nice one, plenty of deer about = full freezers , enjoy the meat.