Utu!

Last weekend it was rain, rain, torrential rain and sitting in the layout bailing water out with our coffee cups. As geese flew by, giggling at us in goose talk.

During the week I ran a theory about going pheasant hunting at Craig’s past SWMBO and was told that celebrating my birthday with my family was pretty darn important and that I better not have any plans on Saturday. Rang Craig and canned the trip. With rain and wind forecast it would have been difficult anyway, but still I felt a bit gutted. Late in the week I called Coch for a chat and he mentioned that maybe a plan to hunt geese on Sunday could be hatched. Ran it past SWMBO on Saturday afternoon, she rolled her eyes, mentioned divorce and walked away. Permission granted! Birthday dinner at Narita (Japanese) was excellent, great food and the Justin Bieber Fan Club had a blast trying out different types of food. Got home, packed gear (waders a must this time!), threw ammo into my bag (yup, 80 rounds should do it). Alarm at 4am, brekkie, thermos filled with coffee, hit the road in steady rain. I’m always surprised at how much traffic is around at that time – it simply wasn’t like this 10 years ago. Where are all these people going? The drive was steady and I arrived on time at the meeting point. Quick coffee and off to meeting point 2 – there’d been a change of plans so I was drifting along with the tide of the new proposition. So we loaded the gear into the trucks and set off. In the early morning gloom I hadn’t a clue where the heck I was - everything seems so much more distant in the dark as there are no discernible boundaries. Finally we were in a cut over maize paddock, re-grassed in early April. Not that you’d know it, it seemed to be a desert of half cm grass overlaid with goose and swan kak. Hard to believe the carnage created by birds. The weather was perfect, drizzle and a steady NE wind, directly away from the roost. In the gloom we assembled the decoys, a mix of full body and shells, got the blinds arranged and re-arranged, had a safety briefing and settled. We had 5 guns, 3 old hands, me and 1 very new to this type of thing. Soon the geese would be in the air…. Well that was the hope. We waited as the day brightened. And waited. Waited some more. A couple of hours in and we were still waiting. We could hear the birds several kms away on their roost. They had to be getting hungry –surely? Finally after an eternity of drizzle laden “drenchedness” a flight took off. They got wind under their tails and set sail to our left before swinging wide and committing. After that it was a bit of a blur. Geese filled the air; we called, flagged, shot and often couldn’t get to the downed birds because more were on their way.

Decoy spread and goose bodies

At one stage a mob of ~60? 80? – too many anyway, descended on us and we had to let them go rather than educating them. As more manageable groups came in we dealt to them.
The shooting was effective, everyone concentrating on their birds and it really was a well-coordinated hunt. Very soon mutterings of “low ammo supply” began to be murmured’ We re-distributed the remaining stock and got stuck in again… so a call was made for a run to be made – ammo in and bodies out. “The Don” made the run and returned with trailer attached to the quad, there was simply no way we were getting the trucks back in the paddock which had turned from grass field to a quaking bog.
We piled as many geese onto the trailer as we could, replenished the ammo supplies and then dragged more of the geese to the edge of the paddock where we covered them in rushes pulled from the drain.

The geese kept coming, but now in smaller mobs and we were able to deal with them very effectively. Then the inevitable happened and the birds began to non-commit and start landing elsewhere. The Don pushed them out of other paddocks several times and again we were able to hit new flocks. Then the flocks began to circle more, stay high and avoid us. Probably birds that we’d shot at earlier. Finally there was a lull. We waited for 45 minutes at and 2pm made the call to depart. Rick and I swept the nearby paddocks and returned with 10 birds. It took another 45 minutes to transport the gear out by quad to the trucks… and then back to base. We arranged the birds in rows and did the tally – we had each offered a guestimate on the final tally, my guess was mid 140’s so when we came up with a final number of 197 it was a complete surprise.

Layout blind aka empties recepticle

We sorted the birds and set up the production line, Coch skinning, Rick & I breasting, and 2 others “legging”. The rain by now was torrential so I quite enjoyed standing under a carport just out of the rain slicing & dicing.

Coch in a sea of geese

Let the chopping begin

Take breast meat, meat into cold water to chill down, then onto drying rack and into heavy bag to be added to the salami pile. Body passed to “legging” team to do their bit. Next bird. 3 and a half hours later the breasting crew was done. The legging boys were only half way in. A quick drink to celebrate a massive day and then I hit the road, but not before draining the dregs of my thermos. At one point on the trip home the rain was too heavy to drive through safely, with maybe 10 feet of visibility so I pulled off to one side. As the squall passed I saw half a dozen cars had done the same thing – at least everyone was thinking safety first.

Home and into the shower. Wet gear onto drying rack. Gun disassembled and cleaned down. Ammo dried and CRC’d….

What a day. What a blimmin long and marvellous day – that evening watching TV I was quite alert and despite my knee lacking movement there was very little pain.

Utu achieved. - with interest. My never-ending thanks to the Mafia boys for the invitation to experience a once in a lifetime hunt..