Charles with his 9½” buck from the Karangarua tops
“… hawk-eyed Charles soon spotted two more bucks …” buck finally disappeared behind a ridge. I’ m sure the buck had horns at least 10 inches long, and Charles was very disappointed.
It rained all afternoon and evening. We put the gas light on and listened to the mountain radio. Apparently the weather was forecast to improve.
Next morning we left camp just after 7 am and soon spotted a buck in the next basin, where it was lying down on a ridge below us at 204 yards. Charles very generously offered Andrew the shot and I told him to aim low on the chest owing to the steep angle. I filmed him as he poleaxed the animal with his 7 mm. Rather than retrieve the animal immediately, we opted to continue hunting and pick it up later, on our way back.
Continuing on, as soon as we looked into the next basin Charles spotted four chamois, one of which appeared to have good horns. It wasn’ t a long shot so Charles decided to use his. 308, which performed well with his 120 gr bullet doing 3100 fps. The animal went down and now both my young companions had a chamois on their first full day’ s hunting. This one turned out to be an old nanny with 8½ inch horns.
After taking the head we decided to go down the ridge a bit where we could get a better view of the whole basin. I spotted two bucks on the move at 300 yards but by the time I had got into a good shooting position they had moved on to 450 yards. Still, when I fired the buck jumped in the air and fell down into some scrub. When we got there I found blood on the stones and soon found the animal
Our six trophies made a good tally for the trip
NZ Hunting & Wildlife 196- Autumn 2017 39