With my sister in law visiting, the girls have been off doing their fun things so I decided I'd take advantage of a bit of spare time to head out for an evening waiting over a large pair of wallows I've been keeping an eye on for some time. The winds were predicted West and with some strength, and with this gully being on the East side of the main ridge I was aware that there would be a fair amount of turbulence as the winds rolled over the top of the hill before sinking down as the evening cooled. My reading of the land and past experience told me that I would likely have to walk with the wind behind me for some portion of the 400m trek in, but if I timed it nicely and with a bit of luck the general movement of air would be downhill from my intended sit point to the base of the gully, then follow the creek line downhill and away. This meant I would be giving up some ground, but as I was expecting/hoping the deer to be either above me in the thickets of the gully top and/or in either of the tiny side gullies on the opposite face it wasn't a total loss.
As it turned out, the winds were worse than I was expecting and I almost turned around and headed for goat country instead, but I decided to push on and have a look anyway - at least I could drop off the game camera in the backpack over the wallow if I winded out the whole area. Slowly moving through the other branch of the creek I had to cross I was surprised at how crunchy everything was, even though this was the damp(er) South facing slope and we'd had a number of showers over the last few days. I'd parked the car in the safest spot to reduce the risk of a limb falling on it (there were heaps of branches down from other strong wind events earlier) and on the road and then the trek in I'd seen a heap of rub trees that had recently (days/weeks old rather than old old) been hit, everything from small saplings to large Brittle Gums. In total I think I saw over a dozen, and this was in a straight line from the car to the wallow.
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As I crossed the first creek bottom, the blackberry and bramble patches were criss-crossed with a large number of deer trails with droppings scattered throughout - plenty of animals around then! Slowly I made my way up to the ancient logging/mining road and contoured across to where I was to drop down onto the ambush point. At one point I passed what looked like some reasonably fresh pig diggings in the road itself. As the sun dipped to the top of the hill behind me I crept down the face through the brush and took up a spot next to a Coprosma bush which would break up my outline, but I had plenty of room to swing the rifle and move for a better shooting lane if necessary. I could see the wallow below me without the binos - well used with light tracks of dried mud splattered on the surrounding blackberry and rushes where the deer were leaving.
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An hour slowly passed with the temp and winds dropping. Some tests with my windicator showed a general downhill breeze into the valley below, but I was confident my predictions were holding true and my scent was then caught by the cooler air in the creek line and blowing away from the opposite face. Around me the wrens twittered and the tree creepers scratched up and down the bark of the trees looking for dinner. A wombat wandered across behind me on a game trail and disappeared, a pair of wallabies chased each other across the opposite face, high up in the treeline above the opening below me. Time passed slowly before I heard a footstep on the other side, but up in the trees where I couldn't see. A few more shuffles and more time passed before I was able to glass the back of a Sambar calf and then a hind well below me on the opposite face. Neither offered any kind of shot and they quickly moved out of sight. A little more time passed when I heard another shuffle in the same area and I was able to pick up the antlers of a stag in a similar position. He was feeding up hill and was about to step into a clearer line so I shuffled across a little and lined the rifle up on the shooting sticks. Through the scope I could see a number of small branches and twigs across the line of site, and he never really gave me a full on broadside shot. As he was feeding in the direction of the wallow, I figured he was making his way up to it, so crawled back to my original position and set up, sliding a 165gr TSX atop a Remington Hog Hammer into the chamber and carefully closing the bolt.
The light was fading and I was a little worried if he would step out in time, when I saw a head poking out from behind a large trunk of a gum in the bottom of the gully. It was rather cold and despite my thick wool poncho, I was shivering a little (and maybe a little stag fever to help
) but the stag paused for a minute or two before turning away and disappearing behind the trunk. Looking at my phone I saw I had maybe 15min of legal shooting light left and probably a little less than that due to being on the East side of the ridge. My patience was rewarded when he finally stepped out a little uphill of where I'd seen him last and fed slowly across the face. Shouldering the rifle and setting myself, I waited until he had stopped completely broadside in a narrow gap between the large trunk he'd stopped behind earlier and a dead trunk devoid of any branches and lined up the crosshairs on his shoulder. Slowly squeezing off the shot, he turned and bolted downhill at a sprint and the roar of 50 odd grains of powder echoed around the confines of the gully set off the cockies who had been roosting in the trees above. The stag vanished into the creek bed below and I quickly reloaded in case he ran across in front of me. After a minute or so, I slowly slid my earplugs out and listened - silence, no crashing of a fallen animal. Unloading, I packed up the gear and grabbed the rifle and made it ready to take a quick follow up shot if he stood up in front of me and made my way down to the creek bed about where he'd vanished. I made my way across through the thick brushes, but couldn't see any marks in the soft ground. By this time, it was down to the last few minutes of shooting light so I grabbed my torch out of the bag and began to move uphill, thinking I'd come in too low and immediately the bright red of good lung/heart blood alongside a deep hoof print showed in the bright light. Following them I was immediately hit with the sweet musty smell of stag and I was amazed to see the amount of blood, all uphill of the deep hoof prints and enough for Stevie Wonder to follow - large sprays every couple of meters. A very short while later I came across a large smear of blood on the hillside and indications he'd taken a fall and had somehow regained his feet and an even shorter time later I came up a slight crest in the game trail and there he was maybe 20m away, alive but clearly on his last legs. Another quick glance at my phone gave me literally 1 or 2 minutes of legal shooting light left so I slid another round home and put another round into the boiler room, at which he shivered once or twice and lay still.
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Only a young stag, but I was really pleased that my planning and execution had come together to work out so well. My original shot had been a little lower than I'd aimed, but that simply meant I'd taken out the heart, though he'd managed to cover about 150m from where I'd first shot him. I dropped the pack and grabbed the knife - the fun was about to begin
