Follow up to Be on the tops at daybreak

I erect my tent some hours later on the tops and there is a keen wind picking up and the temperature has plummeted to the brass monkey level so I dive in my sleeping bag and arrange my breakfast and stove etc. so I can operate it come morning from the sanctuary of the pit and its good night nurse.

Still dark and I have breakfasted and zipped up the tent and now I make my way up the “on end” scree which is the only way of leaving this valley that I can see… a sort of ladder to the next level. It was around this area that I had a fleeting glimpse of a chamois buck on the last trip and I was keen now to try and track him down.

At the top of the scree there is a little gulley to the right that I can easily climb through which leaves me an easy up hill walk onto a tussock ridge which gives me uninterupted view across a wide expanse of alpine scrub and tussock clad valley which ascends at the furtherest side into some rocky crags. The light is quite strong now and although the sun has a long way to go before it embraces me with its warming rays it is an opportune moment for me to extracate my Leica 8 x 20’s and scan the ground ahead. Nothing claims my attention so I procede to drop into the valley then cross the noisey creek and start to climb the opposite side. A half hour passes and I again top another ridge which really affords me a view of the country ahead.

Then I hear the whine of a turbine. A helicopter is seen for a short while before it accelerates and disapears into the folds of the landscape. Three or four muffled shots are heard and then the machine claws for height and it comes into view backgrounded against the tussock  vistas.

Great! I thought what a way to start a new day. I followed the chopper around until it topped the ridge I was sitting on and the pilot casually lifted a hand in recognition has he sped away and although seeing me continued to hunt his way over the ground I had already covered. I know what I would like to do with that arm of yours I muttered darkly to myself and there wouldn’t be much showing out of your arse when I had finished either. That is exactly the respect they show for you…a big fat zilcho. I felt deflated and my heart was torn out. I had no further interest in the day. He had spoilt it to the core. He had stained the fresh canvass with his av gas slipstream and I decided I had already had enough of what was up until then a day full of promise. I trudged back to my tent packed up and was on the point of leaving when the same machine was flying out with four carcasses hanging below the skids.

Footnote; It is still very possible to hunt animals that a chopper will miss but the point I am making is that the machine off and on can be heard all day long and really destroys the point of being there. I could have shot the animals I had seen earlier if it was only killing that was on my mind.