It's been a couple of months since getting out for a proper hunt, so with the weather forecast looking good and a mate who'd not shot himself a deer in a couple of years, we headed out to try and rectify that.
We hoped it'd be empty, but the car park had a few vehicles in it already which indicated the hutt was probably full. So we opted to get a few hours sleep in the car before starting the walk in the dark. Or not so dark as it turned out... Crystal clear night with a full moon meant we didn't need head torches. We allowed plenty of time to get into position and even bumped into a pig and a deer along the track.
We got up high and stopped short of the final position, waiting for the sun to start rising before sidling around as quietly as we could. The crunchy ground betrayed us though and a hind must have heard us. We dropped down as it barked and I spotted her immediately only 150m below us. My mate got his rifle ready but didn't quite feel comfortable with the low light, the angle, and the pack he was shooting off of, so I lined up with my 300wsm instead. The deer barked again and my rifle barked back. It leapt and ran full tilt towards a gulley, but we were confident of a solid hit.
Just as we were done sorting our gear out from the kerfuffle, another deer barked. This time 200m around to our left. My mate quickly lined up off of his pack... fired... and the deer just stood there. Fired again... The deer ran 10 metres and stopped, seemingly unhurt. Unsure of what was going wrong, I lined up with the wsm once more and fired a 2nd time. The deer fell on the spot and tumbled downhill.
The 2nd deer was easy to find but it took a while to locate the 1st. We thought it must have run some distance and likely reached the gulley. Working backwards from there, it turned out to only be 35-40m from where it was shot and had nosedived HARD into the ground once it ran out of steam. 178 ELD-X had done a fantastic job on both.
Deer 1
Attachment 173547
Deer 2
Attachment 173548
So onto butchering before a nice long slog back to the car, with a mate a bit dark about passing up shot 1 and missing shots 2 and 3, but with a deer for the freezer nonetheless :)
