Enda is a young bloke who came to Oz after the GFC, when Ireland hit the wall economically. He was doing some work on our house and showed a lot of interest in a sambar head hanging from the wall in my office. We got to talking and it turned out he’d been an obsessive sika hunter back in the old country. One thing led to another. Enda got his firearms license, we headed to SSAA St Marys last week to zero the rifles, and on Friday morning we were heading up through the Hunter Valley with our destination being a top spot for a weekend’s deer stalking.

 

First stop was Lake Liddell, where I’ve been hankering to have a carp session for yonks. We set up in a break amongst the bulrushes at the back of the van park. The fishing wasn’t hot by any means but we managed to put a few on the bank and had a lot of fun doing so:

 

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Back on the road soon after and checked in at the property in time for an evening hunt. Enda so fired up it would have been cruel to deny him that. All went well with both of us putting some prime tender venison on the deck and Enda scoring his first Aussie fallow:

 

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Next morning away in the half light and back up on the hill while the katabatic wind was still moving downslope. I was pleased with this fat doe:

 

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For Enda a feral goat is something he’d always wanted to bag and on the higher benches we found a representative billy:

 

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With the afternoon getting pretty warm we hunted some cool gullies and managed to locate some long nosed bacon:

 

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Back to the camp to discover one of our hosts was having problems with an old batch of reloads:

 

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Not much time to spare on Sunday morning so I wanted to spend it on my current passion, fox calling. We set up on the southern side of a good looking gully and got the predator call working. As happens so often the red dog came on the compass point you’d least expect, being both uphill and downwind. At a measured ten metres he propped and  needless to say it wasn’t easy getting a clear sight picture in the 8 x 56 Docter. More luck than skill, but he went down hard:

 

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Enda was over the moon and his enthusiasm was infectious. We drove back to Sydney with eskies loaded with prime venison, and I’m tucking into some backstrap tomorrow night. What a fantastic country we live in to offer these opportunities, and what a great sport – or should I say, obsession – hunting is. Looking forward to the next trip already.

Andrew

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