Ah yes. I was stalking (crawling / slithering) through the grass and thistles steeply uphill into a good old fallow buck with a buggered leg from brawling in the Rut. We’d seen him the day before, hobbling away from an encounter with two much younger bucks, and now there he was resting up right on the bush edge at the very top of the back paddock. The wife was hanging back behind me in cover, watching for any unseen does that might raise the alarm. Three sharp clicks on the UHF, and I was to lie still and wait for the all clear. Got to within about 90m of the buck, trying to find a position to shoot with a clear line of sight on the hummocky, mega steep face.
Was just sorting myself out for a look see, when a god awful metallic screeching sound echoed around the valley. Loud, entirely unnatural, horrible noise, went on for several seconds. WTF?! The best thing I can liken it to is a heavy train skidding on its tracks.
The buck instantly stood and turned to look downhill, oh bugger he’s going to run. But he didn’t run, he just stood stock still, staring, and by turning to look downhill he gave me a perfect shot, which I took full advantage of, and down he went.
I signalled to the wife to come on over, a bit of a way and steeply uphill. The first thing she said was not a breathless and lovestruck “Oh husband, my hunter, father of my children, you are my hero” but “What the fukk was that bloody noise?!”
We were busy sorting out the buck when all of a sudden the same noise came flooding up the valley. Only this time it ended with a crash. Not too dissimilar to a car driving into a lamp post. Because of the steep faces curving all around us it was really hard to tell which direction the noise was coming from. At the time and unbeknownst to us we both picked completely the wrong direction for the source of the noise.
Fast forward to later that evening. We’re back at the cabin enjoying some cold ale when our mate arrives on his bike. “Hey you dumb bastards didn’t you hear Such&Such tipping over in the digger? Bloody well got ejected and hit his head and out cold in the river, was there for a good coupla hours! Farkin’ miracle he didn’t kark it!”
Such&Such was realigning the old 2-section steel bridge across the ford. Except we didn’t have a clue he was there. Hadn’t heard him arrive and didn’t hear the digger tramming down to the ford. The first metallic screeching noise was the first effort at dragging the one section up and over the other section as he lifted it with the Hitachi. The second metallic screeching noise was him trying to do it again, followed by the digger tipping over into the river! After we’d recovered the buck and gone back to the cabin, we had passed within 40-50m of the incident, well below us, completely oblivious to this silly bugger lying there in proper strife.
Every time I use that bridge I think of that incident and how close it came to a very unfortunate outcome, which I have no doubt both my wife and I would have felt deeply terrible about. But it didn’t happen, the bloke was fine although very cross with himself (expensive), and we got the buck. So all good.
