Hunting Trip in New Zealand (Long Post)

[GazMorris]

Folks, find below a report on a trip hunting for feral goat and red deer in the New Zealand bush last month.

My brother-in-law (CGS) is based in Auckland and with his 40th coming up he was planning a trip out into the bush to a privately-owned block near Taumaranui in the middle of North Island, where there are feral goats and red deer. Three of us (me, CGS and our confusingly-similarly named friend CGW) made it down to the entry point to the block on Tuesday evening after a four hour drive down from Auckland. We'd stopped on the way down to climb up to the top of a hill and serious lookout, from where we could see from Taranaki to the West (aka Mount Fuji in "The Last Samurai") all the way to the Eastern shores of Lake Taupo. Ruapehu (aka Mount Doom in "The Lord of the Rings") was only about 10 miles away to the South East and steam or smoke was visible to the naked eye coming from vents in Ngauruhoe, the next mountain over. NZ is a very geologically active country!

Taking the next turning off the road, we dug out the key to the hut from its hiding place on the way down the dusty track to the upper camp. Getting ourselves settled took no time at all, before we enjoyed a small whiskey out under the stars. There is little or no light pollution down in this part of the world and it was a cloudless night, so we indulged in a bit of amateur stargazing before turning in around 22:30.

We woke up at about 05:15 as we wanted to get out for a morning stalk before we would be met by the rest of the party. CGS stomped back into the hut and announced that there was a possum outside and asked if one of us wanted a crack at it. Possums were imported from Australia for fur back in the 19th Century but then escaped and are now considered a major pest, so most areas operate a policy of termination on sight with extreme prejudice. I replied that if it was still there after I had got dressed I'd have a shot. After a brief tussle with my trousers and the combat jacket I bought in a army suplus store for a tenner, we went outside with CGS's supressed Ruger 10-22 and loaded it with some subsonic hollow point rounds. Said possum was still in the tree when CGS aimed his lamp at the tree and after a moment getting used to the scope I put the crosshairs between the orange eyes and squeezed the trigger. The rifle made a surprisingly quiet "clack" noise, followed shortly by a dull "thud" from the undergrowth as the now-defunct possum fell out of the tree about 12 yards away. A brief search and we found the possum under the tree that it had tried to escape up with a small entry hole pretty much square between the eyes. I was very relieved that I'd made a good go of it, as a dropped shot would have probably resulted in much taking of the p*** for the rest of the trip.

Our vermin-control duty done, we made the Ruger safe and locked it away before retrieving CWS's and CWG's deer rifles, both Tikka T3s in 308 Win. The Tikka T3 is an incredibly popular rifle over here in NZ, apparently, for both hunting and "for fun" target shooting. With CGS in the lead we walked very quietly along the track that would later lead us the 14km down to the lower camp by the Whanganui River. The track occasionally opened up into clearings of grass and scrub pockmarked with elephant grasses and cabbage trees before closing up again into ponga (a kind of tree fern) forest. About a kilometre down the path, we entered the largest clearing of all and peered round the corner; CGS froze and motioned us to look just under a particular tree at the fringe of the open area. To the naked eye, there was nothing apparent; however through my 8x32 Leica binoculars there was something obviously deer-shaped lurking indistinctly behind the forest apron. After a quick look through the scope of his rifle CGS determined the range to be 163 yards using the laser rangefinder built into his flash new scope. This latest purchase not only includes the range finder, but also a mildot reticle which automatically shows how much aim-off is required for the selected bullet/muzzle velocity combination currently in use. Coupled with the moderator and the bipod, this makes for a heavy rifle, but one which is very suited for longish shots taken from the prone position. In any event, we could not determine the sex of the deer so no shot was taken. While there is no open and closed seasons for red deer in NZ, it is generally considered very bad form to shoot a doe if she's likely to have a faun not yet capable of looking after itself and we'd not yet been given any directions by our guide, with whom we'd be meeting up later that morning. We continued our stalk a little further, before heading back to the cabin at the upper camp.

After a small breakfast we wandered over to the other cabins where we would meet the others coming on the trip and our guide Danny, a tall and very solid-looking Maori with a hairstyle and moustache that probably wouldn't have been out of place on a 1980's Liverpool United footballer. Having grown up in the area and hunted in the bush since childhood, he's probably shot more goats, deer, possums and pigs than most people have had hot dinners. He also knows the area intimately, which is no mean feat given that much of the place is a mixture of pimary (i.e. unlogged) and secondary (i.e. logged and regrown) forest on terrain as steep as the Lake District. Much of NZ was logged in the 50s and 60s but there are pockets of land where this has never happened and the original tree types like remu, a tall tree with deep red wood, remain in place; however where the land was cleared, smaller types like ponga and cabbage tree have grown in place and create a thick bush.

Before taking the 4x4s down to the river camp, there had been a special treat organised for CGS' birthday. Maori chef Charles Royal would be taking a travel writer from the Sunday Times on a bush walk to talk about traditional bush foods, and we'd be able to tag along for some of the trip. Even walking around the upper camp area, there were plenty of things to be found: horopito leaf (a bush pepper), cabbage tree hearts and a brief talk on fungi (all brown fungi in NZ are edible except the one with a fill under the cap.) We collected some cabbage tree hearts to add to the hangi (a traditional Maori way of cooking) which we would eat that night. After an hour or so of learning about native foods it was time to head down the track and into the bush. The trip down to the river camp was taken at a fairly leisurely pace, dictated by the seriously steep terrain in places and the three stops we made at lookouts. While we were enjoying the first stop, which gives a great view across to Ruapehu, a couple of hunters from the next block drove up on their way back from a hunting trip. The guy on the second quad bike had a fairly normal-looking hunting rifle (also a Tikka T3 I think) but the guy on the lead quad bike had a serious-looking piece of hardware resting across the front of his bike with a big nightforce scope, a Barnard action and the mother of all muzzle brakes on it. After a brief chat between him and Danny, I plucked up the courage to ask him about the cannon; was it a 338 Lapua? He replied that it was a 375 based on a necked down 416 Rigby case, and pulled out a live round to show us. Apparently he used it for long range deer hunting, but you could have successfully hunted any kind of large game currently alive on the plant with that monster (as well as most major dinosaur species, probably.) After a bit more chat we got back in the trucks and headed on to the next stop a few miles down the road.

We made it down to the lodges down by the river a couple of hours later. Coming down the steepest slope (probably a bit steeper than 1 in 2 at the most serious point) we could see glints of the river through the bush. Soon after we rounded the bend and could see the beauty of the river and lower camp. Consisting of a main lodge made of local timber, two small huts further back up the slope and a covered outdoor kitchen the camp had been built in a stretch of cleared and leveled bank which looked across a sixty-foot wide stretch of the Whanganui River peppered with boulders of the greyish slate-like stone. After debussing and unloading our (small!) bags we took a few moments to explore. I was amazed at the calm and beauty of the place, but we also had most of the comforts of home, including hot, running water ad flushing toilets. The girls would be joining us at the end of the week and we would all be grateful for the mod cons by the end of the trip. Looking inside the lodge building, over a dozen different kinds of local wood had been used, each of which had been labelled with a small brass plaque. At this point Charles, who had come down in another of the 4x4s with the journalist, asked if we could provide some goat and we remembered our real reason for the trip. Having unpacked the rifles, we got back into the trucks and headed back up into the hills. Not 500 yards up the track CGS called a halt and motioned for me to get out of the second truck; they had bumped a family of goats grazing in a small clearing by the track at the top of the first hill. CGW handed me his T3 and I jogged up the slope to meet up with CGS. We both loaded the rifles and put safeties on before walking slowly up the track; however on reaching the top there was hide nor hair of any goat. The pattern was set for the rest of the afternoon, with shots either not being safe or the goats disappearing into the underbrush before we could get into a shooting position. After a couple of hours we returned back down to the riverside camp, disappointed, and had the hangi without goat.

Over the next couple of days I hunted with both CGS and CGW in both early morning and evening stalks. Although we say plenty of goats (shootable and non-shootable) at ranges from 25 to 400 yards, we'd agreed that we should try and get a deer first; however there were only occasioanal and brief glimpses. Red deer are suprisingly elusive for animals that reach 300lbs in weight. On the Thursday morning stalk, CGW had the rifle and I was acting as his spotter when we saw our first shootable deer but managed to thwart our own ambition. Following the 2 kilometre drive up from the camp, we'd carefully walked along one of the more remote tracks at the edges of the property which had a broad grass verge with plenty of forage for hungry deer. Creeping softly up a gentle slope and round a lefthand bend, CGW spotted a doe about 40 yards away when he cautiously peeked up and over a hump in the road. Danny and I backed off ten yards and "went to sleep" to give him clear room to manoeuvre into position but disaster struck; he inhaled some dust or grass seed and had to stifle a cough. The doe's head came up and she started looking around for the source of the noise. We all froze, but the game was up and she did the neat disappearing trick that deer do. A couple of unhurried but lightning fast steps and she disappeared into the bush, not to be seen again. We slowly crept up the track only to be barked at and, as it was getting late in the morning, decided to call it a day and sloped back down the hill. One of our compatriots, MC, had a marginally more productive morning and came back to camp with a stinking billy goat, old and tough enough to match the 50's vintage Mauser 98 in 7x57 that he inherited from his father and still shot with. It was quickly decided that the goat would probably be unfit for human consumption and was relegated to being dog tucker for Danny's hounds.

The afternoon's entertainment was to be a pig hunt. Danny had fetched his two pig dogs from the upper camp, along with his father's pig gun. A seriously ancient lever-action Winchester in 357 Magnum, which was now relegated to single-shot duty owing to a broken magazine tube which had never been repaired. After rootling around in the various glove compartments and ash trays of the 4x4s he found a couple of rounds of the right calibre and shoved them in his top pocket. Along the way, we turned up bits and bobs from 22 short, 22 long, 243 Win, 7mm/08 and 308 through to 270. At this point I asked what pig hunting entailed. Roughly speaking, you bimble through the forests while the dogs search around your rough track to flush out a wild pig. Should they do so, they give chase (and so should you) until they manage to grab the pig and hold on while the lead hunter draws his knife and kills the pig with a stroke to the heart. It's a bit like foxhunting but for people who think that sport insufficiently barbaric and who have a much greater tolerance for personal risk. Not my thing personally, but I was willing to give it a go once. In any event, we didn't find a pig that day so it turned into a rather nice but pretty arduous walk through the thick forest. The rifle is apparently kept in reserve if things "get out of hand". Given Danny's size, stature and general level of competence, things "getting out of hand" has got to be quite an experience.

On the Saturday morning I had the rifle on a stalk when we spotted a reasonably large red doe with no faun feeding beside the track (all of the tracks have heavy bush/forest) on either side. The lefthand side rose up sharply to form a steep bank, while there was a steep dropoff on the right. We got within about 80 yards of the doe, who was just round a righthand curve in the road with a gully between her and us. She walked behind a bush and was shielded from view, so I knelt and took aim waiting for her to reappear the other side of the bush and waited. And waited. After about a minute, I decided to move forward a bit further and was just getting settled into position (again kneeling) when she calmly walked out from behind the bush, up the road, behind the next bush and presumably round the next bend in the road. Total exposure was under 3 seconds, but as I wasn't settled and didn't want to wound I didn't shoot. The forest nearby is mostly secondary ponga forest. In places you could be about 5 yards from a deer in there and not know it, so following up a wounded beast is not really a feasible proposition. If I had stayed in the original position (or better yet got prone) then I have little doubt that I'd have had a clean shot. Moving forwards, we crept round the bend but there was no sign of the doe and after another 30 minutes of creeping around we called it a morning.

That evening I managed to take a shot. CGW had wanted the next morning stalk, so I got to be shooter twice that day. We'd agreed that we'd take a small, juicy goat if one was available and so it proved. I took the goat at a range of 50 yards. We were driving round in one of the 4x4s to the walk in to our stalk and spotted a coupl of them about 60 yards away. We stopped the truck and I opened the door, got out, chambered a round and sighted on the goat resting the rifle through the open window of the open car door; however I couldn't even get a sight picture because the shot was almost into the sun. Moving forward and left into the shade of a nearby tree I knelt and then shot the goat (which was on the run at this point) at a fairly steep upwards angle (the shot was safe as it was on the side of a steep slope which rose over a hundred feet.) The bullet entered the body behind the right shoulder before passing through the upper chest cavity and exiting via the far side of the spine slightly further back because the animal had turned to run across and down the slope at a shallow angle and because of the upwards angle I was shooting at. Running up the slope, I reached the goat which looked like it was still trying to move feebly. Being without immediate access to a knife I put a second shot through the back of the skull and resolved the matter; however as it became obvious shortly afterwards, this was almost certainly not needed. I made the rifle safe and CGW came up the slope a couple of minutes later with our knife and helped me get the organs out and the head off. When I opened up the chest and abdominal cavity, there was massive blood loss evident and significant damage to the lungs. The 150 grain ballistic tip had done a very nice job.

We celebrated CGS' 40th that night with barbecued New Zealand Wagyu steak, fresh sweetcorn roasted over the fire (the best steak I have ever had) and a couple of bottles of an extremely good Rioja that I'd brought over with me. An incredible trip into the bush with great friends. If you ever get the chance to go hunting in the NZ bush, go do it.

Links
Go Bush - http://www.gobush.co.nz/
Charles Royal, Maori Food - http://www.maorifood.com/index.htm

Gaz

PS - I have no affiliation to Go Bush or Maori Foods.

[M99]

[Ovenpaa]

Brilliant report Gaz and yes we do need some pictures.

[Watcher]

Great article even without pictures; but it would be good to see some as well.

[GazMorris]

Miserable buggers the lot of you . I'll put some photos up in the next day or two...

Gaz

[Gaz]

Brilliant report, well written. But we need pics!

[GazMorris]

As promised after some nagging, photos!

Some of the crew (including the girls) who arrived on Fri PM at the first lookout...


4x4s and the view back up the track...


The view down to the river from the lodge...


The lodge and outdoor kitchen...


CGS' 40th as sponsored by Realtree outdoor sportswear...


CGS' goat under the care of a handy helper...


Peeling my goat on the last day. Note the exit wound from the 30 calibre 150grn ballistic tip...


Cheers,

Gaz

PS - The goat got made into a biryani a couple of days after we returned to civilisation. It tasted fantastic.

[kennyc]

wow!nice photos, but I think I'll stick with softpoints

[Ovenpaa]

Great pictures and good to see the girls getting involved as well.