Beaten by the track… well, almost

(in crappy dutchie-English, except for video, to pursue openness)

In the world of travelling, the highest priority is to go OFF the beaten track. However, not seldomly travellers find that by going off the beaten track, the track might beat back. Something like this happened to me last weekend.

First of all, a short description on the situation before it all started. Work was going OK. Most experiments are out of the way and a new series will not start before next week. Contaminated cultures are a thing of the past and the algae are flourishing now. A substantial amount of writing the report is already done and where in the last experiments my hopes on an exciting outcome were not very high, the upcoming experiments might actually give some really interesting results. Apart from work, things are still going flawless at home: good food, still free use of the gym in the mancave, even had a drunk-ish night at the pub after a late night working and got myself into deep philosophical conversations with welsh, british and australian folks (yeah Sprig and Ferns is THE place to be here in Nelson). Weekends, not being used for hunting for quite a while, were spent tramping (with Patrick and Milly in Kahurangi for instance) or just at home (reading a book!). I bought two bikes in anticipation on the future arrival of both my parents and sophie and vincent, who’ll probably enjoy riding those (and repairing them makes me happy as well). Yeah, life’s not too bad over here (except for that sometimes the old homesick feeling can just get back and then nothing seems right, 15mins of heavy rowing however seems to be an effective way to deal with this).

Anyway: all those things might sound exciting and/or relaxing, they’re not exciting/relaxing enough for me! So that’s why Patrick and I went for a serious 3-day deer hunting mission last friday-sunday. Ok and maybe we also did it for the meat… and maybe also for the kill.

Adrenalin… yeah

So on thursday afternoon, quickly finishing the last experiments (credits to Patrick for speeding this up by helping me a bit), I throw my stuff in the back of Patricks car and off we went to Hapuka river mouth, where we spent the first night sleeping in the car after a good conversation while listening to Katy Perry’s California Gurlz and drinking Australia’s finest Coopers beer. Next morning a 5h hike along the riverbed, through the river, through manuka/beech forest, climbing on ridges and surfing on scree led us to Barratt’s Bivvy: a two person facilitating hut, apparantly made for the needy hunters. Pretty flash as matresses, a pillow and a sheet were provided along with some pan’s, instant coffee, firewood and firestarters. We dropped the packs and left for a first hunting session. We climbed up halfway to a ridge, the hill was mostly overgrown by NZ’s finest native grasses as well as by a fair amount of prickely (how do you spell this?) shrubs such as Goarse (again, just a guess). I can proudly say that, where most of the time Patricks mind inexplanably seems to be able to find easier, safer and better routes than mine through the NZ landscape, this time I reached the top earlier and with way less scratches, leaving patrick behind in what seemed to be an ambush of goarse shrubs. Yes I had my laughs (from inside then, you don’t wanna trigger revanche). I had a good sleep in the sun that noon, lying bare feeted in the alpine vegetation (mainly consisting of mountain daisies and what seems to be a sort of reddish clover family member, but surely the biodiversity is way higher than you might expect on first sight and I’m quite convinced this can beat “het Stenen hoofd” Marthe).
So I was sleeping, waking up periodically to eat some muesli bars, chocolate, or drink some Raro (NZ’s own version of Tang, which is delicious when made up in fresh mountain river water), while Patrick was intensely using his binoculars to scan the tussuck faces in the area for deer, chamois or goats to shoot. Nothing was spotted that day, against all expectations because sign was VERY abundant. There was not a single place where you could rest your ass and a skeleton, pile of poo, footprints or shrubbed stems of trees could be observed. Very impressive actually: there must be loads of animals and if you don’t pay extreme attention you’ll probably never see them. Anyway we returned to Barratt’s bivvy, started a good fire, I had a shower in the river and the meal consisted of those good old NZ sausages on a stick heated in the fire and a splendid mix of cheese flavoured instant mashed potatoe and creamy bacon carbonara pasta as a side dish + a bottle of red wine I brought (I had most of it because Patrick wasn’t too keen enough which of course was fine with me)

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Saturday, the pressure for a kill was already rising, we climbed up approximately 600m to the saddle of Mount Stace, from which we could see both valleys (don’t bother their names) and thus, logically, the change on spotting something doubled. Within 15mins, Patrick spotted the first deer. It was over 540 yards away (which converts approx. to 490m) and was thus hard to shoot. As there was a river between the face it was on and our position, it would be difficult to stalk it a bit and get a better position, so we tried it from where we were. I put my fingers in my ears and watched through the telescope (Leica, 60x zoom) while patrick aimed and pulled the trigger. The results was amazing! I saw a bullet trail (only observable under windless and certain other climatological conditions) just like in “the matrix” approach the deer, and it missed it by 20cm. Not a bad shot at all, but nevertheless: it missed. However, as the bullet impacted on the ground behind the deer, the animal got scared and fled downhill, disappearing into a bush. This is essential, because a couple of seconds later Patrick would say that given the fact that the deer descended instead of ascended, it must have been hit. With this uncertainty in our minds we decided that someone should go after it to check. I felt that, not been giving the shot itself, I had to act here, so I took the hunting knife and binoculars and started my descent through 600meter of shrubs and trees to end up in the river. From there it was still a hell of climb up to the place where we’d “shot” it and it was by looking at Patrick through the binoculars that I was able to navigate my way: Patrick was wildly pointing his arms in the direction I had to go to. System worked pretty well so far. Nevertheless I ended up climbing on almost vertical slippery walls before I got to the location. The shrub we were after turned out to indeed be inhabited by a young deer. A deer that, as soon as it saw me, launched itself away and was gone permanently. No traces of blood: it was in good condition. I tried to run after it, with my hand close to the knife, but it was of no use: 4 feet are better than 2 in this situation.

This is where our basic communication system had a crash. We didn’t agree on a code for: give up the hunt, the deer is gone. We had foreseen two outcomes:
1. Patrick would see the deer trying to escape and would then gesture me to sit down where I was so he could safely fire another shot
2. I would find the deer, half dead of completely dead, kill it if neccesary and then sign Patrick to come over to get his part of the meat.

The option “deer is fine and got away, I’m coming back” didn’t occur to us.
Also I didn’t know whether the deer that fled was spotted by Patrick and maybe killed after all, in which case he was now trying to locate me to the new location.
Chaos
Kernel panic
After 30mins of heavy gesturing Patrick gave up and demonstratively picked up the packs and made his descent. I started to do the same thing right away. We met each other at the river: Patrick hadn’t seen it, it was a loss. We were tired, sweaty and scratched. But not tired, sweaty and scratched enough.
We climbed back on top of the saddle and descented back in our home valley, back to the bivvy. Had a good feed (sausages, pasta and mash again, no wine though) and went to bed.

Sunday we planned to go back to the saddle (as we at least SAW a deer from there) and then climb onto Mount Stace from there, then descending on the ridge and ending up in the main valley which would lead us back to the car. First parts worked: the ascend to Mount Stace was already known terrain by now and our legs and fitness were sort of catching up with it. The descent on the ridge was rather painful: soon we couldn’t see where we were going because all you could see was the tree in front of you and we dropped down to the right, ending up in insanely steep areas were you literally held onto trees and ferns to prevent making an almost free fall.

After doing this for an hour or so we ended up in the river: scratched and exhausted but glad and proud we’ve made it. It therefore was sort of dissappointing that after a couple of hundred meter huge waterfalls prevented us to walk down the river. So we had to climb back up into the forest to manage a way beyond those waterfalls, then getting back to the river. This happened twice and was a real mental challenge (does this make you mental challenged?) but the result was as needed: we ended up reaching the track again, which by then was a superb luxury. 3 more hours walking followed before we reached the car. No meat, no food left, scratched, stinged and bruised, but still satisfied!

With a smile on our faces, pumping out Katy Perry again, we drove to the nearest McDonalds and had a NZ Prime Angus beef burger combo with big fries and soft drink and one (me) or two (patrick) big Macs each. A unusual experience by the way to observe someone who’s eating more than I do… but then again my breakfast portions of rolled oats porridge were 3x bigger than patricks..

To end, a short note on facebook: Pieter and Joke made their disagreements on my plan to abandon the use of my blog for updates and after a short but intense period of facebooking I have to agree that facebook basically is just a lot of cool people acting foolish. So I won’t spent too much time writing all my interesting hunting gibberish down there and instead you’ll have to visit this blog, also in the future! A prerequisite of course is to give a comment on this post.

Have fun!