I woke with a start. Despite the fact I’d only crawled into bed a scant 4 hrs earlier, something was wrong and it took me a minute or two, too work out what it was.
That was it! The morning chorus. It was kookaburras and cockatoo’s. I relaxed and thought about the 3 ½ hrs flight there that ended up taking 6 due to Melbourne airport being closed for a period. Thankfully Gryph was still at the airport waiting when we finally touched down, and despite it being well past midnight we carried on to crash at his place that night.
We spent the day getting the final touches sorted. Things like hunting permits and firearms license no’s etc, and I have to say I found the licensing division of the Victorian Police extremely good to deal with. Despite not giving them the required 30 days notice, they still got my license to my Aussie address the day before I arrived. Same for the Dept of Sustainability and Environment who allow you to hunt public land on a receipt of payment if you can’t be there to get a hunting permit in person. All this made things easy.

The rest of the day was spent having a look around and sighting in a rifle for me to use.



We spent the evening sitting on a wallow hoping for a first Sambar sighting, but no luck, though the dog thought there may be one nearby.
A 4 am start next morning saw us in a state forest at dawn. This was to be the routine for the next week. Up at 4am to be hunting at daylight. Out of the bush around 11 to minimize the chance of stepping on something legless, then back to the hunting about 4pm and hunting till dark. Home about 8 or 9 pm, a feed and beer then into bed, hopefully before midnight for a 4 am start next morning.
First spot was fairly open, and we walked to a vantage point to wait for seeing light. Gryph was 50 yards to my right looking down onto a ridge he said the stags liked to use when I caught movement on a clearing about 600 meters away. I attracted his attention and he came over to verify that it was indeed 2 Sambar stags, though as light increased, he felt sure they were young and we left them be to investigate other areas.
He positioned me in a saddle with a grassy face that the deer evidently liked to use while he checked out another area.

It wasn’t long before the mother of all Honk’s sounded from just inside the bush below my position, and then again and again, all up 7 or 8 in a row. I couldn’t work it out as the wind was right and I was behind a Tea Tree bush, until Gryph arrived from below. His dog had lead him down and pointed a good stag which managed to stay in the thick stuff not allowing him or I a shot before disappearing into even thicker stuff.
We spent the next few hrs stalking a gully back to the ute, but the wind was bad and our chances were slim. My attention was pretty shoddy too, as there were just so many new sights and sounds to come to grips with. Roo’s and wallabies, birds of many form,


and of course tree’s/forest’s that look nothing like the ones I’m used too. Everywhere I looked for the next week; there were sobering reminders of the Black Saturday Fires from two years back. We were not far from Kingslake where so many died, and to see a now green forest of trees still carrying their charred trunks, and getting a whiff of cold ash was quite sobering. The scale of these fires is unimaginable to most that haven’t seen it I suspect. It was for me anyway and I suspect these occurrences are burned into the psyche of Aussies who live in such areas going from the stories I heard.

All this new stuff maybe why I didn’t catch up with a deer for a day or two, though Gryph caught a couple napping. I would get dropped of in the dark with a rough mud sketch of the area, and an x where the ute would be, while Gryph would hunt either parallel too me, or in another area. We would meet up at the ute sometime mid morning. One valley in particular just caught my imagination, with beautiful shooting lanes between the trees, patches of cover and large areas of grass under the canopy.


I’d give my left nut for similar bush stalking country here, but despite plenty of sign, I never put up a deer or had a honk. I would have loved to go back with a bivy bag and to just lay there at dusk and dawn as they obviously moved through very close to dark.
We ran out of time for that one, though I did hunt the other side of the same valley a few days later and put up a real horse of a stag on a face opposite me. I could have shot him through the back legs as he ran off, but chose not to as I felt slightly undergunned with the 7ml Rem Mag I was carrying.
Most days we hunted different spots due to either weather changes, or not wanting to pressure one area too much. One spot was a nondescript little granite hill off a high road that slipped away to some good little creeks and swamp gullies for a K or two behind it. Gryph took the true left gully, and I took the right. They were meant to meet up a distance behind the granite dome, which was to be our rendezvous point, but somehow I misread the instructions, or got caught up in photographing wallabies and wombats and echidnas,


because dark found me some distance from where I should have been and hurrying on a rough compass bearing back, hopefully to the car. I came out on a farm fence, and decided I was some degrees out, when a rifle shot sounded roughly in the direction I thought I needed to go, and a K later I came over a ridge to see car lights shining off tree trunks and a patient Gryph waiting for my return.


The next day Gryph’s mate George arrived. George is of Italian descent, and could be best described as having a passable resemblance to Al Pacino. I soon found out that these two love nothing better than to spend hours arguing and insulting each other, and claiming each others hunting spot’s as their own. Good fun, and at least it provided a distraction from Kiwi baiting.
That evening we went to one of George’s spots. We’d actually visited it the night before when it was one of Gryph’s, but the wind had been wrong, so hunted the other side of the road.
The plan was to hunt in line, me in center, with George on my left and Gryph on the right. Because of the topography and my speed, I soon slipped back slightly so we formed a V with The other two 100 yards ahead on high ground, and myself working a small gully which I would later find out joined another gully at right angles.
I was trying to keep up, but I had a large area to keep under vision, you use your binos a lot for this kind of hunting, and the Roos and wallabies the others flushed naturally funneled into my gully and streamed past me which was a neat sight. The roo’s especially, leaping logs and windfall, or diving underneath.
George had just disappeared behind cover further left of me, and I hadn’t seen Gryph since the start when I came to the intersection of the gully’s. I paused to scan some very nice swamp country with long native grass in it, when movement caught my eye, and round the corner of the far face trotted a Sambar. It paused and looked right, turning nearly side on, slightly quartering away from me. I knelt down and took a lean off a windfallen gum, and studied it with the scope.
When we left the car, Gryph had told me to shoot a calf if I saw one, as he wanted some nice meat for friends. My inexperienced eye told me that this was indeed a calf, as it didn’t look big, and had a decidedly young face. I quietly dropped the bolt and put a loud round through its chest. It was off, and out of sight behind a line of trees to the right at an alarming speed. After it disappeared I heard a crash, but to confuse things, a head popped into view very near the same spot the deer had been standing, before a calf trotted from right to left in front of me. I was already re-loaded, and up came the rifle again, but something was wrong. This was definitely a calf and I soon realized the deer I’d shot at was bigger. Too be sure I checked and rechecked whether this deer was wounded in any way, finally I was confident it wasn’t, and although I’d been told to shoot a calf, I let it go to concentrate on the deer I’d shot.
Soon George showed up and I directed him to where the deer had stood, then Gryph arrived from a position not too dissimilar to where I’d last seen the shot deer disappear. He had worrying news though. An unharmed Hind had run up to him, and stood a scant few meters away before departing. It was definitely unhurt and this had taken place on a similar line to the one I described my deer as having taken.
We searched for the next hour for any trace of blood…. Nothing, yet I was convince 100% that I’d shot it. We did find a set of running tracks, but couldn’t make sense of them, and the questions headed my way were getting hard to argue with. Finally I was getting close to conceding that I may have missed, but knew I hadn’t, and think I ended up saying. “Its always possible I missed, but if you ask me if I shot it, I’m a hundred percent certain I did.” We kept searching though the light in the bush was starting to disappear, and then, 50 meters from where I thought it had stood at the shot, and on a far steeper angle, Gryph picked up a leaf with a tiny spot of blood. Running tracks were soon picked up, and a slow stooped crawl soon revealed a very occasional spot every 10 meters or so with the deer going up hill. We soon intersected with the running marks we’d found earlier. Things were starting to make sense now. Three sets of eyes continued at snails pace despite the dimming light, and across the flat ground above the gully. Slowly we picked up more and more blood, the trail turning in an arc back into the gully of the shot, and then straight down hill. I knew we would find it now and George voiced a similar opinion which relieved me no end. George and I kept on the blood trail, while Gryph went ahead on a hunch, and soon ‘Here she is!’ came back to us. She was dead only a 120 meters from the starting point. Huge relief flooded me, the tension had been immense, and we were all smiling. George summed it up with something like, “This is why I hunt Sambar, it’s not over with a rifle shot, and the search is part of it.”

Photos and gutting out of the way, we decided she was about 15 months old, not full grown yet, I thought I could carry her whole, but discretion got the better of me as even a ¾ grown hind is huuuge, and we cut off the back legs, backsteak’s, loins, and one shoulder for the carry back. Those back legs were a pretty good load of their own.
Beer and wine until midnight, before another 4 hrs sleep, and back into it next morning again.

We all went our separate ways next morning. I crept down an open ridge with short grass on one side, Bush behind me, and the opposing face very steep and sparsely covered in gum and Tea Tree. It was very similar to the hunting I might do at home. Sneak 50 meters, sit down and glass for 10 minutes, then another 50 and so on. Towards the end of this run I picked up a shape that looked suspicious behind a Tea Tree. If I imagined hard I could make out a hip a shoulder and neck line. It didn’t move though, but I had nagging doubts, so opened up my daypack and ate an orange. After finishing that I put up my bino’s again and just caught a neck movement as it turned its head. Right I now knew it was a deer, but not what sex. It was on a really plain piece of hillside, and in moving closer I knew I would lose the spot behind trees, so took a compass bearing, and walked down in a straight line. I came back into view about 200 meters from it, but could not for the life of me find the spot. I sat there for quarter of an hour, and couldn’t pick it, so moved 30 paces right. Immediately I picked out a recognizable landmark and put up the scope on the deer. As I did that it stood, and let out a honk and turned to run. I saw it was un-antlered, and followed it in the scope, shooting it repeatedly in my imagination. I sat there for half an hour hoping to catch a stag sneaking off, but saw nothing, and with the morning getting on, turned back towards the car.

The days ran together quite fast now, each day one, two, or all of us saw deer we could have shot, but it was Sambar stags or nothing now. I was so focused on this fact, that when I spotted a Fallow Buck walking across a paddock on a farm George had access to, and he asked me if I wanted to shoot it, I said no, we’re here for Sambar and we all walked away from it. That’s how addictive it was.


A very good wallow, i'm sitting on the preaching sight, the stick above my head is covered in mud.
The final evening came round, and I still hadn’t taken a stag. Gryph put George and me on his supper secret spot, while he went elsewhere down valley. I was carrying the only rifle as George had his movie camera. I’d spent an evening or two sitting here. You are only a hundred meters from a well used wallow. Every time there was fresh wallow mud, but we hadn’t seen anything come in, in daylight hours. Thirty minutes before true dark, and a thud to my left had me turn round to see a stag walk forward and start grazing a hundred meters from us. I turned slowly, tugged Georges sleeve and pointed. He filmed it for a bit, then said shoot. I looked at the stag and thought, ‘he’s only young, low 20’s, I probably wouldn’t get him mounted.” It occurred to me that it was a disservice to shoot this stag. I couldn’t use the meat, and he would be a better animal next year. I told George I wasn’t going to shoot him and we sat there for a while before George said, ‘I think he’s better than you realise, and there’s many Aussie hunters who haven’t shot one like that. Despite that I said I was happy not shooting him, and we continued to watch incase something bigger showed up, until it was too dark to see. We met up with Gryph, who saw 4, one being a possible monster, as it had very thick antlers though he couldn’t catch their length from the distance he was at. We went home and watched the footage George had taken, then John turned up some game came pic’s of the same stag at the wallow.

Johns Game cam pic of the stag
He would go mid 20’s and was eminently shootable, but I’m not worried. I don’t ever want to be in the position where I feel I have to shoot something just because I’ve travelled somewhere, or its cost me money to be hunting there, and I may never shoot a better Aussie Sambar, but I will be back to have another go and I’ll remember that stag on the hill side for a long time.
Cheers John, George for a wonderful trip and a great chance to experience the Aussie Sambar hunting culture.

Great story and pics there Shanks... you are a better man than me, I would have had a chop at that Stag given a chance. Well done .

Nice tale told Shanks,glad to host your hunting.

I`m not 100% on that stag in the last pic being the same one,I reckon the bloke on the video might be a little better in length..who knows?

I will keep looking for the other fella i saw that evening while the weather is cool enough.

The other fella will be interesting going by what you saw.
It holds god for the next few years with some promising heads in the area.
How come you havn't brought up the snake and the Koala yet? ... I've been braced for it.

Leaving that to you.

Please check your home email

Good work fellas!! Thanks for the write-up!!

Good write up and Picture mate well done

A very good write up with some great pics. I hope you post some more of your hunts on here.
Pete

Very good editorial and photos.

Your first 2 or 3 photos died in the link. I am not sure if I am the only one that can't see them or what the deal is.

I missing one photo for some reason on photobucket.

Great hunt & story. Yes the honking "bell" of a sambar is unforgettable!

Good read and hunt there well done on your first sambar.

I must really have been busy lately, Craig - only just noticed your story. It's a great yarn and I love the pic of the stag seeing off the wombat.

Cheers
- Paul