Originally Posted by
Graeme Sturgeon
Thanks Mate, How are you. I read your story about Otutu with interest. It brought back memories. I have been in their a couple of times on meat shooting runs. Its hard to get Sika up there in the winter alright.
I am going to tell you how we used to hunt the little bastards. We used to leave camp at 10 and travel a reasonable speed all day expecting to put up twenty and maybe get three or four of them. I know this is opposite to what most people might say and I have no beef with anyone else's hunting methods. But experience showed us that it was all that stop to listen and start off again that put deer to flight (think stalking cat) Accept the fact that the deer is going to hear you before you see or hear it, but if you kept the noise down and just sort of glide in they don't know you are not another deer. They cant afford to run from sound, they wouldn't get a root or have time to put away enough tucker to survive. We always found we could trade distance travelled for the loss of a few animals from noise and always be on the right side of the ledger. Not just with Japs either.
Otutu was the first hut that I can remember hearing about the Kaimanawa Huntaway. I must have been told about it by Dick Hart and Paddy Clark the resident meat hunters. But out to the west of Otutu, possible on the Maori land or even on Ngamatea there was some great golden tussock basins with small patches of mountain beech in the bottoms. We used to roll bloody big gooleys down the ridges into the bush to flush out the deer. Why this method is called the Kaimanawa huntaway I don't know because I have used and seen the method used in other places.