“ until the Lions have their own chroniclers the account of the hunt will always glorify the hunter “

Had a relaxing day off the bike in and about Carterton killing time after my friend Mike Allanson gave me an invitation to join an evening foray out to Te Munga to scare me up some meat . Mike and his family have privileged access to this great spot , an old station now slowly regenerating into Manuka and native species . The place has a robust Fallow deer population and Mike assured me that this exercise would be a dead cert . In the end it certainly was with 6 dead deer and my bike loaded up with a nice cache of back steaks .

Scoping the hills

Does the Allanson family enjoy hunting together ? Do bears shit in the woods ?

Mikes 2 sons are both very keen , both well armed and know what they are about . 15 year old Kane is absolutely passionate about the sport, and absorbs knowledge from the many utube content available.

Kane was sporting a new rifle which he was keen to test . We had barely driven the quad onto the block before Kane’s got his first 2 kills . He had a bit of a scare as his hunt involved tracking down a spiker he had wounded , that had a bit of a go at him , charging him by all accounts . He won .

The basic technique involves getting to high ground and patiently scoping the hills to find where pockets of deer emerge . With super accurate rifles we saw many deer which we could have taken however if they were too far off the effort in retrieval wasn’t deemed worthy of the effort . Mike preferred steep county where if the deer was shot it might conceivably roll down the hill to tracks along the valley bottoms with old farm tracks for simple quad retrieval.

Aiden being a little younger stuck closer to the olds . With dusk not far off we meandered down a steep track , Mike in front and Aiden the tail end Charley . Mike and I didn’t notice a small herd ( maybe 7 or 8 ) but eagle eyes Aiden whispered us back . He quickly set himself up and bam bam thank you mam , we had 2 lovely Fallow deer . One , as per Mikes desire , rolled over and over for about 50 metres till it was right on a farm track . Mike didn’t even get to use his own rifles , like why have dogs then do your own barking !

With dusk falling we loaded up the quad with our 2 , then picked up one of Kane’s kills before heading to the pig dump where the kills are left for the wild pigs to clean up ( another story )

The mission involves removal of back steaks and some hindquarters , but the darkness made things difficult and with school tomorrow for the kids we were on a mission to get on and out .

I finally got back to camp after 11 pm , quickly bagged my venison and into the freezer . I’ll be eating quality meat for a couple of days . Slept well .