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