PIECE OF CAKE

Ethan is clearly inflicted with hobby-sickness, an itch for living an active life that can never be scratched. No matter how hard he tries, there just isn’t enough time to do all the things he wants to do, but he has a crack at them all anyway. One minute he will be building a timber bed frame, and the next he is found preparing intricate meals in the kitchen.

Ethan ‘meets’ a new town, city, or area by running everywhere around it. He has an innate sense of taste for good food and drink, yet can thrive off energy gels and packet noodles if needed. He achieves twice as much in a day than the average bloke, with half as much sleep, day after day. And boy does he know his way around a coffee machine, such a powerful anti-sleep supplement for Ethan.

He is a bloke that has many balls up in the air at once and still manages to catch them all. To quote Shakespeare, “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”. This is clearly directed as a complement, but what do you say about a man who is a master of many trades, and only a jack at some? Google defines this type of person as a ‘polymath’, but the enviable part of my brain thinks ‘show-off’ would be a more appropriate term, if only he was actually boastful about his abilities.

So, with the above in mind, it was with little surprise that I received a call on a Thursday to discuss a quick weekend visit. The plan was for Ethan, his wife and their two dogs to zip up from Sydney. They would leave after work on Friday so Ethan and I could get up early on Saturday morning for a hunt. We would hike up into the mountains, kill a deer, dress it, butcher it and package it up for the freezer. We would then sit down to a nice meal on Saturday night, before they zipped back down the highway on Sunday morning. I agreed to this plan without hesitation before I had a chance to fully think it through. My freezer was already full after a few successful hunts during the winter. But, as a meat hunter, the best chance to continue hunting is to hunt for the sake of someone else’s freezer. Not that I need much convincing to go hunting. Such is the mindset of a hunter, when someone says hunt, we say “when do we leave?”

I had found myself in a hunter’s conundrum. I had committed to a poorly planned hunt, at short notice and with a friend who hadn’t been deer hunting before. I wasn’t too worried about Ethan’s ability to keep up during the rigors of the hunt — the opposite would likely be true given his athletic ability. It was the pressure of making sure we had a successful hunt that was mounting. Ethan and his wife had been extremely generous to my wife and I over the years, providing us with a roof over our heads whenever we visited Sydney. I was keen to return the favour in the best way I knew how: a freezer full of free-range meat after a great day in the bush.

However, as my fellow hunters know, it isn’t as simple as popping out to the big outdoor store and coming home with a shoulder load of meat wrapped in hide and fur. It is also not the best impression of hunting to present to a new hunter. At least, this is not the experience I had when starting out. Hunting is not a piece of cake, otherwise what would be the point? Don’t get me wrong, I love a quick meat hunt and I hate going months without getting a deer on the ground, but the variables are not in your control. To pull off this quick hunt I would be relying mostly on chance and luck. As it turned out, the hunt was a piece of cake, but maybe not in the way you would expect.

It was early September and I had access to a private property in the Upper Hunter region of NSW, about an hour from home. Spring had sprung and the tight grip of the recent drought had finally loosened. We had about 15mm of rain a day or two before the hunt, but the weekend was due to be clear and with a nice southerly to help manage the humidity and give us some consistent wind to mask our hunt. I clocked off work a little later than planned on Friday and quickly packed and prepared for an easy departure in the morning. At dinner time I flicked Ethan a text message to check on his travels and get him geed up for the hunt. His wife was still stuck at work and they had not yet left Sydney. I hadn’t heard anything further by 9.30pm, so I sent him another message and started to get ready for bed so I could get a good sleep before we departed about 5am.

“She isn’t home,” he replied. “Haven’t heard from her for a few hours so there must be an emergency at work.”

At this rate, with a four-hour drive and a stop to get some food on the way, they did not expect to arrive until about 2am. I offered my sympathy for the situation and suggested they should just travel up in the morning and we would head out for an afternoon hunt instead. True to his nature, Ethan was committed to the current plan and a three-hour sleep on our fold-out couch would suffice for him. He would be ready to go by 5am on the dot, and he was.

In the pre-dawn, we quickly got dressed and fired up the kettle for a French-press coffee on the road. I donned my best camo shirt and cap, complete with brown Scandinavian hiking pants and camo gators. Ethan donned his grey jeans, white T-shirt and white trucker’s cap, effectively dispelling any dream I had of us blending into our environment that day. On the drive up, I went through the usual spiel about how to best hunt as a pair and what the game plan would be to take advantage of seasonal deer behaviour and the local habitat of our hunt location. As the main hunter, and the only one with a rifle, I would take the lead and Ethan would follow a few steps behind. I would communicate with body language and he would make a discrete noise if he saw something that I had missed as we moved along.

The sun rose quickly as we slowly progressed uphill and closer to the tree line that the deer call home. The morning thermals were pushing downhill and into our face and we managed our shadows by sticking close to the drainage folds where most of the larger trees grew. By 9am we had picked our way all the way up to the tree line, stopping regularly on the way to glass the sunlit hillsides and catch our breath. This was my go-to hunting spot and the deer usually outnumbered the flies. At the very least I had always seen a deer whenever I hunted there. However, my worst nightmares were quickly being realised. We had lost the prime morning hours without so much as a deer sighted. Ethan said he was happy to have just gotten out for a nice hike in a beautiful location, but I picked up a faint sense of disappointment. We were not burdened by any specific deadline, and it wasn’t too hot, so I suggested we press on into the bush in the hopes of catching a few bedded deer or maybe a straggler who was still retreating into cover after a morning feed.

We made a large arc through the bush, circling around to the southern side of the gully in which we hiked up. We bumped a few kangaroos, which is as certain as taxes and death in most places I hunt. By the time we arrived back at the edge of the bush, it was about 11am and starting to get uncomfortably hot. Ethan and I convened and both decided that the hunt had ended and we should start making our way back down the steep hillside to the car. If there is one thing that I have picked up over the past few years of hunting, it is that once you mentally decide to stop hunting and head home, your chances of running into deer exponentially increase.

I told Ethan to hold up a second while I relieved myself on a poor unsuspecting bush. I set the rifle down a few metres below me and facing downhill away from both Ethan and me. I faced away from Ethan and directly at the bush, giving me a lovely view of the valley below me. Just as I was hitting the mid-stream of my flow, I caught some movement off to my right. I slowly turned my head downhill and instantly identified a deer walking through the long grass. He was a young spiker, and he was making his way along a fence line towards us, some 50m or so away and closing fast. I turned to look at Ethan to find him flailing his arms and making quiet whistles at me. He had obviously seen what I was seeing and was stuck helplessly in place with my back turned and the deer walking straight at him. I zipped up my fly and walked a few steps down to my rifle. I sat down behind it with my knees up, resting my left arm on my left knee as I searched down the scope for the deer. Within seconds he came into view and was only 30m away, closing in on Ethan’s position quickly. It was now or never. I loaded a round in the chamber, turned the safety off, trained the scope on to the deer’s vitals and pulled the trigger. The deer dropped on the spot, with a couple of leg kicks, each less convincing than the last, before he expired.

It took me a few moments to fully process what had just happened. I had literally been caught with my pants down, yet had somehow recovered, only to be rewarded with a perfect meat animal for my mate’s freezer. Ethan made his way over to me and we had a quick recount of the story. I collected the rest of my gear and we slowly made our way over to the spiker. I am not normally one to take many hunting selfies, but something about this hunt and this deer appealed to me.

We dragged the deer over into the shade of the nearby trees so we could field dress it. We opted to gut and carry out the deer whole, reducing the meat’s exposure to dirt, grass and flies. Because of the heat, I offered to dress the deer myself and provide a little hands-on instruction to Ethan along the way. They say the best way to enhance your own learning is to teach someone else. Ethan was urging me to be extra careful to not burst the bladder and taint the meat. I assured him it would be fine and that I had done this plenty of times before. So, it goes without saying that the very next knife swipe along the stomach membrane pierced the bladder, releasing the urine down the exposed meat on the back legs of the deer. I kept my composure and did my best to ignore the ‘told you so’ glare I was getting from Ethan. I had no idea if this would adversely impact meat quality, so I gave it a wipe with a cloth and continued dressing the deer.

We bagged up the heart and liver for dinner that night and the lungs and kidney for the dogs. Ethan was quick to offer to carry the deer back down the steep mountainside to the car. I was even quicker to accept, as I was carrying the rifle and field dressing kit, but most importantly I knew just how steep the decline was. Ethan did his part well, and I am sure that I gained a few extra points on the board that day. Anyone who has carried out whole animals before will know what I mean.

Before long we got back to the car, loaded up and set off for home to find that the ladies were out shopping or something. It was the middle of the day and a little hot to be butchering a deer, so I added a bag of ice to the Esky and gave it a few hours to cool down while Ethan had a well-earned shower and nap. In the afternoon we hung the deer up on the gambrel hook in the shed and set to work on the skinning and breaking down of the animal. The dogs watched on, drooling and whining for a little piece of the action. The ladies’ watched on too, drooling and wining in their own way.

To ‘butcher’ something can mean different things depending on the outcome, but Ethan took to the animal with care and patience and was rewarded with many choice cuts of meat to enjoy over the coming months. I was rewarded with photos of the interesting and tasty meals that Ethan prepared with the venison in the coming weeks.

The big old buck in the sky must have been croaking down on me that weekend. I had turned a hasty hunt into a successful one. I had been preparing for hunts like this for a while, collecting the essential ingredients over time. So, I guess you could say it was a piece of cake.

Within seconds he came into view only 30m away.