We broke the clouds on descent into Queenstown, New Zealand to find a fresh powdering of snow on the mountains and much to our surprise, a second raft of clouds below us. Floating in a shadowy winterscape, I did a little mental math as to whether I had packed enough cold weather gear for my hunt.
Still dropping into the massive basin with peaks on all sides we punched through the second cloud ceiling and I breathed a sigh of relief. Where the upper mountains were already in winter, the lower valley was firmly in fall’s grasp with foliage on full display. Green pastures and bright blue lakes rushed past as our landing gear came out and we touched down on the opposite side of the world.
I smiled to myself – not many have a wife so understanding as to allow them to combine a 15th wedding anniversary with hunts for stag and fowl.
In her defense, all it took was showing her pictures of the swanky accommodations – geodesic ‘ecodomes’ on the shore of Lake Hāwea in the heart of the South Island. Personalized day-trips to the fjords at Milford Sound, promises of the softest wool ever spun (a blend of sheep and the invasive brushtail possum, of all things!) and winery tours with all the vino and fromage a girl could ask for. She was giddy at the thought.
Me, I’d been drooling over the chance at a mountain hunt for stag. First introduced to the South Island in 1851 by British royalty, a subsequent 200+ shipments of red deer, most originating from Invermark in Scotland, found New Zealand’s lush temperate climate and lack of predators an ideal habitat. Flourishing alongside other introduced game species like fallow, elk, whitetail, tahr and chamois, these stag propagated to such a degree that the government began culling operations in 1910 to both ensure the health of the herd and to reduce the negative impact on sheep stations dependent on grassy pastures in the mountains.
“We still see the original Scottish lines each year during the Roar when they drop down out of the high country to mate. Since we’re late in the season now, we’ll mostly have the local stag which show more of the German and British genes, which also means more mass and points,” rancher/outfitter Richard Burdon explained.
With time wasting, my wife Dawn and I jumped in with Bre, one of Richard’s long-time guides, to check my rifle’s zero and hopefully get eyes on some Red Deer. An American who splits her time between New Zealand, Canada, Africa and the States, she would prove to be small but mighty and one heck of a resource when it came to all things New Zealand.
“At this point they’re pretty run down from the Roar, so they tend to stick to the better grass just up from the farming operations,” Bre said. “As long as they aren’t pressured too hard, they’ll just hang out eating and trying to put weight back on before winter. They pretty much bed right in the good grass and won’t move too far day to day.”
Travel hadn’t affected my rifle, with the little Benelli putting together a 1.25” group at 100 from atop my overstuffed daypack. I had no doubts, as the Lupo had consistently surprised me with how well it shot back home in Wyoming, and from a proper rest it would do under an inch nearly without fail.
Back in the truck and picking our way up the tacky mud two-track, we ascended out of the lake-side farmland and into the edge of the wilderness proper. Ditching the truck and grabbing binos, we side-hilled in a race with the setting sun to try to locate stag for the morning’s hunt.
Rounding the face of a vertical, grassy slope, a lush valley meandered out in front of us, slowly ascending into the mountains. White spots on the opposite face turned out to be a fallow doe and fawn that my Leopold binos told me were a little over 800 yards distant. As I watched, a darker buck moved in a cut just to the right of them, the paddles of his rack clearly visible even at distance.
Edging around the face further, we froze as a solitary female Red Deer fed into the open just 125 yards in front of us. Slowly sliding out onto a slight knob, the landscape opened up further and the three of us settled in behind our glass.
“I’ve got one, probably 275 yards on level with us,” Bre stated.
”Right above the trail as the hill curves back around? I’ve got him at 380,” I replied.
“That makes two then, and yours is a bit better. He’s older for sure, those crowns are so dished out you could drink wine out of them…” She quipped.
With that we heard a throaty bark to our left and a young stag broke from cover, pausing on the fern-covered slope to stare at us from 70 yards. After another cough of derision, he trotted off into the depths of the valley.
“We might back out, we know those two are here and the bigger one might be worth chasing tomorrow,” Bre remarked.
As we retreated downhill to the little Mahindra pickup we came upon a pair of Paradise shelducks, a male/female set linked for life. As we got too close for comfort they took to the sky, the low note of the male and the higher shrill response of the female echoing through the valley as the Parries winged their escape.
Settling into a chef-prepared dinner back at our lake-side basecamp, my wife let me know that she had had the perfect amount of stag hunting and that she’d be heading to town in the morning with her guide Julie. After learning that Dawn was an environmental engineer having worked in electrical generation, they had booked her for a behind-the-scenes tour of the local hydroelectric facility, something that perfectly engaged her inner nerd.
Waking the next morning to a light, misting rain and an appropriate English breakfast (hold the beans), we loaded our daypacks and rifle into the little 4×4 and set off up the ring road along the shore of the lake. Going well past our previous turn-off up into the heights, Bre saw that I took note and filled me in.
“We’re going to check out another spot where we’ve been seeing some stag, it just depends if this weather clears off and we can get a look.”
Pulling off the road and motoring to the top of a small knee jutting out into the lake, we broke out our binoculars to see what might be bedded on the face above us. The rain had mostly stopped, but the soupy fog and clouds were rolling down over the peaks in front of us to obscure an unknown amount of mountain above.
Fallow could be seen picking their way through the brushy face, moving from one grassy expanse to the next. Chatting and glassing, the cloud ceiling seemed to raise for a moment, revealing a fresh set of clearings higher up the mountain. Working my binoculars from right to left, Bre beat me to it, spotting a trio of stags and a hind all bedded in the left-most opening right next to a brutal rocky cut that climbed its way up into the clouds. As quickly as they were there, the clouds spilled over the ridge and descended once again, obscuring the clearings from sight.
“Well, the second one from the right looked really good, you want to go for them?” Bre asked.
“Sure! The binos put them at 936 yards, but that’s the corrected distance on the horizontal. Not that that’s horizontal…” I chuckled, looking up at the very vertical face in front of us. “Let’s get to it!”
Before I knew it we were headed up a rocky path and out beyond the sheep paddocks of the lower elevations. The higher we got, the thicker the soup until we were finally at the height of our quarry. Side-hilling through the ferns and low thicket we passed through two large clearings and expected to find the deer in the third. As we snuck to a small ridge that gave us a slight vantage into the next opening a fallow burst from the thicket uphill from us.
“They must have fed all the way up here while we were hiking in,” Bre leaned in and whispered. “Let’s hang here and see if it clears up a little.”
Sliding to the ground and setting my rifle on Bre’s pack, I went to my binos and scanned the mist for anything that wasn’t a fern. After a few minutes I relaxed, letting the glass fall to my chest as the damp of the ground began to seep up into my pants.
As the slight breeze slid up the face towards us, a momentary break in the fog suddenly revealed the black silhouette of a massive stag standing inside of 70 yards out front of us and locked in on our location. He turned and walked five steps as the fog closed in around him once more.
“Straight out,” I whispered. “He was right there.” I pointed on a line to him as Bre turned her binos in his direction.
”Nothing, you saw one?”
”Yeah, and he was massive but he knew we were here,” I replied.
“Ok, same plan. We’ll just wait and see what the fog does. They can’t get past that cut, so they can only go up or down and we can get on them.”
We settled in even more and gave the weather time to change, which it did, albeit slowly. Eventually the ceiling lifted to reveal a face devoid of animal life as far as the eye could see. Working our way slowly through the undulations and onto the grassy patch the stags had been bedded on, we worked all the way to the brutal cut and I could see what she meant when she said they wouldn’t try to escape that direction – it was equal parts cliff and boulder field with a waterway at its bottom and no clear path down.
“Brutal.”
“Yep, so now they’re either above us or below us. Below us would be fine, but above us means we could push them all the way up over the top if we get unlucky. If we go low and don’t get into them, we might have another chance tomorrow or the next day – we’d just get higher next time,” Bre suggested.
With that we slid down through the ferns and across the face, keeping a mindful eye out for the stag but knowing that the chance of them somehow popping out of a crease in the landscape was unlikely. Soon we found ourselves back at the rocky path and headed for the little Mahindra.
As I let my thighs take a breather from the downhill, Bre took a moment to pick a handful of perfectly ripe rose hips at the edge of the path, musing that New Zealand’s foraging opportunities were excellent with an impressive array of mushrooms that were safe for consumption. Sorting the seeds from the pulp with my teeth, I indulged in a few of the sweetly tart fruits myself.
Back to the truck we glassed the face and munched on our packed lunch, seeing a whole lot of nothing.
“Well, do you want to go try to get on the pair from last night? There’s a good chance they’ll be somewhere close to where we saw them,” Bre offered.
“I think that’d be great, especially if we can find that old palmated one…”
With that the little truck fired up and we carved through the twisties before jumping off onto the gravel two-track from the night before. Up we went, soon catching the clouds as we gained elevation.
Retracing our steps to the knob from the night before, we stopped to glass. It wasn’t thirty seconds before Bre caught motion lower down the valley – the tips of antlers bobbing as a stag fed.
“Not the shooter, but maybe the other stag from last night? Let’s get closer.”
We dropped down to the washed-out remnants of a shelf road and tried to keep as low as possible. With Bre right in front of me, I peeked over her shoulder and saw two sets of antlers and then a third set attached to a head looking right at us through a break in the grass. I slowly dropped and whispered to Bre that they were just over the rise and at least one was clued into us. She shrugged out of her pack and set it in front of her, motioning me to get on it with my rifle.
Belly-crawling the last few yards to the edge, I got behind the scope to see all three stags moving away across the grassy clearing, on alert but not running. Giving the VX-4 a twist to get a bit more magnification, Bre whispered that the old stag I was after was second in line, a welcome tidbit since they all looked massive in the wispy fog. Settling in, I willed him to pause, my finger finding its home on the Benelli’s trigger.
No matter how hard I wanted him to slow, he kept chugging up the hill, his gait in the rocky terrain making him bob up and down in my scope. He slowed just a little and my finger started to take up slack on the trigger, only to have one of his compatriots pop into view right behind him before the three disappeared around the edge of the hill.
We were up and moving as fast as possible from a crouch, trying to get an angle on the trio before they disappeared forever. Rounding the hill, the stags were 75 yards further up the slope and still moving higher. Again on the pack, I got one glimpse through the scope before they disappeared around an edge once more.
Back up on our feet, we rotated all the way around the hill with eyes trained up the slope. We stopped just shy of a trickling creek, whispering quietly and speculating on where they might have gone. Out of nowhere, two very young stags materialized from the fog a little over a hundred yards above us, trotting right to left in the murkiness.
“Get ready, our three might be following right behind them.”
Bre slid to my left and dropped her pack to the earth, but before I could join her our stags were there, pausing to stare down at us.
“The second one!” I heard, sliding to the earth and planting my elbow on my knee, putting the reticle behind his shoulder.
The thwack of the ELDX hitting him right in the boiler room was a sweet sound, but my programming from Idaho elk hunting had me racking a fresh round as the stag arched his back to the hit. Hurriedly I sent a second round, knowing the moment it went off that it would sail just barely over the top of his back. With the stag still standing there in shock and his buddies milling in confusion, my third round again echoed a meaty impact and he stiff-legged and shook with the firing of nerves before falling off his feet and sliding, then tumbling all the way to the creek bottom.
Riding an adrenaline high, I hardly registered the high five from Bre and collected the neat pile of ejected brass from the rocky mud from my right. I’d fired three shots as quickly as I could run the bolt – my hunting buddy and mentor Brooks Murphy would have been proud. While giving me grief for the miss…
The climb to the stag’s final resting point wasn’t far, but it was more vertical than anything we’d done to date while being slippery as could be. Finally catching sight of him, panic hit – his antlers and head were up! After the dramatic tumble he had taken I’d had no doubt he was dead, but there he was looking up the slope…
Before I could get my sling off my shoulder Bre gave a whoop and a holler. Luckily, my moment of fear was unfounded as in his rotations down the hill he had artfully caught his massive left-side drop tine in the fork of a manuka tree, stopping his fall just short of the creek proper and suspending him perfectly by his rack.
Laying hands on him I was incredulous at how heavy his antlers were. With 31 points, dished and palmated crowns and so much mass that I couldn’t wrap my two hands around multiple spots along each beam, the scarred and stained headgear was something to behold.
After an impressive display of knifework from Bre, the meat, cape and head were secured to packs and from out of nowhere she produced a victory beverage to make the hike out just a bit sweeter.
A fine mist ushered us on our way and about the time my legs started screaming the little white pickup came into sight. We rolled into camp at Glen Dene just in time to watch the sun illuminate the mountains across the lake in its dip to the horizon.
The breeze rippled in the fall leaves, bringing with it autumn’s crisp. Normally in late May I’d be plagued with withdrawals, dreaming of September and hunting season as I’ve always known it.
Richard met me at the door of the lodge with a fresh gin & tonic.
“Congrats! Now that you’ve used the rifle, get that shotgun ready. How do ducks, pheasants and maybe wallabies sound for tomorrow?”
The smile on my face must have been ear to ear – how sweet fall is.
This article was written by Zachary Hein.