If you came here looking for a story slagging off foreigners you are going to be disappointed. The tourist in question is a good young french fella who has been drenching lambs and dirving tractors for me on the farm since the start of the new year. He has worked in the ag support industry in France and has aspirations of working and running a sheep farm when he returns home. Based on getting to know him a bit I thought he might be interested in coming for a freezer filling walk. Having always had a curiosity around hunting, but a more difficult path to accessing it in France, he couldnt say yes fast enough!
I'll spare you all the details on the approach, as it is exactly the same as my last write up. Its a great spot and with no venison in the larder and a spectator to impress, I was pretty keen for success!
As soon as we hit the edge of the trees, there were 4 distinctive reddy brown shapes standing out in the still slightly watery morning light. We had about 10 seconds to figure out what we were dealing with before the deer grazed into a gut, disappearing from sight. There were 2 hinds, a fawn and a pretty poor fully stripped spiker.
Knowing the lay of the land well I decided we would close the gap and wait for them to appear on the other side, about 150 yards away. I let French know the plan and we crept forward and got set up on a good rest.
The fist animal to reappear was the larger hind. I was pretty sure she was the mother of the fawn so was off the menu. The youngen came out pretty close on her heels confirming my deduction. Another couple of minutes and the other 2 were back in sight too, with the spiker about 20m lower and closer to the bush than the young hind. I reckoned we could get the truck pretty close of not right to where they would fall and decided 2 deer was on the cards.
Spiker first, Bang, he takes a few halting steps but looks out on his feet, move to hind, Bang, she wobbles and drops, back to spiker in time to see him tumble. Its all over in 4 seconds. The older hind gathers her baby and canters off.
Well French is impressed, so far I have cut a good impression of a competent hunter. 2 shots, 2 deer and when he asks how we are going to carry them home I get to tell him we will just walk back for the truck.
This is where the idiot, who until this point had just been lurking and observing, reveals himself. On the way to clean the deer I was checking how far I reckoned I could get the ute. Looking at one little climb I thought, "that could be dodgey". The idiot immediately snuck from the back of my mind and assured me it would be fine.
About 40 minutes later, French and I are rocking, pushing, revving and swearing as we try to extract my stuck ute from a bog! Thankfully, after 30 minutes or so we got it free and, with the idiot suitably shamefaced, dragged the deer a bit further to be loaded for the trip home. Probably for the best, at least French had to do a little work for his meal!
He took some good pictures along the way too.
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