Pete the Bushman by Peter Salter

Author:Peter Salter [Peter Salter and Nigel Zega]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775536833
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

BUT AT LEAST HE DIDN’T have me in fear for my life. That pleasure came courtesy of a couple of Aussies who contacted me from Queensland. I don’t know where they got my name, but I wish they hadn’t.

They were brothers-in-law who both wanted to shoot a stag. Sensibly, when they phoned to set up the hunt, they asked me what standard of fitness was needed on the West Coast. I told them they would need to be pretty fit because there was an awful lot of climbing up and down hills. Big hills. Steep hills. And the bush was probably like nothing they’d seen in Queensland. So I reckon I gave them fair warning of what to expect.

They told me they’d done a lot of hunting in the outback, riding motorbikes to round up pigs and shooting them with revolvers. It took me a while to get my head around that, but I soon worked it out. Cowboys. They were cowboys. A couple of wizards from Oz I was going to have to watch out for.

When they turned up they seemed like nice enough guys. They worked in a huge coalmine, and they’d made an effort to train by running up and down the steps of one of those massive dragline machines that scoop coal out of the ground with a bucket so big you could park a Toyota Land Cruiser inside it. I know this last bit is true because they showed me the photograph they’d taken.

I put them up at home and on the first evening I thought I’d take them out into the local bush to give them an idea of what they were up against. It was easy-going, gentle country close to a deer farm where I often found wild deer working along the fences. Deer are like that. They just like to be together, so wild deer will want to know what’s going on inside the fence.

It was unlikely we’d put anything up, but I wanted to see how these cowboys handled themselves before we graduated to the serious stuff. We parked the vehicle and walked in by a rough track I’d made through the bush. As we came into the open, one of the guys said he’d head off to the left. Fine. I’d take the other guy right and we would meet back at the car in half an hour. ‘West Coast bush is different from open blue gums,’ I told them. ‘You can only see 20 to 30 feet in front of you when it gets dense. But it’s pretty forgiving where we are here. Just get a feel for it and we’ll meet up again soon.’

I took my guy — I’ll call him Wizard — for a gentle stroll up the track. We didn’t see anything, or even spook anything, so we started to head back to the car. Then we heard a gun go off. Great, I thought, the other guy had got one. I have to say I was surprised, but also pleased for him.

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