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Opening0:00

In poor light you rarely see the whole deer. You see a patch of white at the edge of the timber, flicking away, and that's enough to name it.

This is Lore and Lead. Episode one. Know a fallow.

Five things in this one. How to name a fallow at a glance. The four coats it comes in. The five other deer it gets mistaken for. How to tell a buck from a doe in October, when some of the bucks have already dropped their antlers. And how a head of antlers grows, year by year.

At a glance0:34

Start at the top. The fallow is the only wild deer in Australia that grows a palm. That's the flat, shovel-shaped top half of the antler. If the antler broadens out like a shovel, you're looking at a fallow. On a buck in hard antler, the question answers itself.

In poor light the antlers get lost against the scrub. The back end rarely does. Bucks and does both carry a white rump, edged by a black horseshoe. Below it hangs a long tail, black on top and white underneath, and a feeding fallow flicks it almost nonstop. Often that flicking patch of white is the only thing you see. It's enough.

Then size. A buck weighs fifty to a hundred kilos, and a doe thirty-six to fifty-six. A mature buck runs about ninety, and you'll know all about it the first time you drag one to the ute.

Two more marks, and both say buck. Under his belly hangs a tuft of hair called the brush. It stays there after he drops his antlers, so it's the thing to look for in October. And on a mature buck the voice box sticks out of the throat like an Adam's apple, and the neck swells in the autumn rut.

Here's one for the fire. Fallow is a colour before it's a deer. The Old English word fealu meant a pale reddish or yellowish brown, the colour of withered grass. The fallow paddock is a different word that merged with it centuries ago. The deer has nothing to do with resting land.

Four coats2:16

No deer varies in colour like a fallow. There are four main coats, and all four can turn up in the same mob. That's why people regularly report a different kind of deer that turns out to be a black or a white fallow.

The common coat is the one everybody pictures. In summer it's rusty chestnut, with rows of white spots along the flanks and a dark stripe down the spine into the tail. In winter the spots fade almost to nothing, and it goes a dull, two-tone grey-brown.

Menil is paler and brighter, with bold white spots it keeps all year. The horseshoe round the rump is caramel brown instead of black, and there's no dark stripe down the back.

Black fallow are almost black, or a very dark chocolate, much the same summer and winter. Under a spotlight the body disappears, and you get the eyes and not much else.

White fallow are white to pale sandy, and they get whiter with age. They aren't albinos. The eyes are dark and the hooves are pigmented. A white buck at night is unsettling the first time you see one.

Fallow moult twice a year, and the spring change gets going around October. So a deer on this trip may look scruffy and patchy, halfway between two coats. Nothing is wrong with it. And colour tells you nothing about age, sex or quality. A black buck and a white buck from the same paddock are the same animal in different paint.

The other five3:52

Eighteen kinds of deer were let go in Australia, and six took: fallow, red, sambar, rusa, chital and hog deer. On this block you'll almost certainly be looking at fallow, but red and rusa turn up in pockets of northern New South Wales, and chital are establishing along the Queensland border.

Chital are the trap, because they're spotted all year, like a menil. Look for a white patch on the throat, and slender, pointed antlers with three points a side. No palm.

Sambar are the biggest deer in the country. Dark all over, with big round ears, and a stag can stand a hundred and thirty centimetres at the shoulder and top three hundred kilos. Three heavy points a side.

Red deer are big and reddish. Stags roar in the autumn rut, where a fallow buck croaks, and their antlers are round, with a crown of points on top.

Rusa carry three points a side in a lyre shape, and the back point of the top fork is always the longer one. Hog deer are the smallest, low and stocky, mostly in the coastal swamps of Gippsland.

Which all comes back to one rule. No palm, no fallow.

Buck, doe and fawn5:09

A fallow male is a buck, a female a doe, and the young a fawn. Stag, hind and calf belong to red deer, and using them for fallow marks you as new to it.

The old hunting books went further and named a buck by every year of his life. The list is in the Boke of St Albans, printed in 1486. Fawn, pricket, sorrel, sore, buck of the first head, then buck. A great buck wasn't an age at all. It was a head: two palmed antlers, with four forward tines and twenty-four points down the back of the palm.

On the hoof, antlers are a poor clock. They depend on feed and condition as much as age, and they go back as a buck gets old. Body shape tells you more. A young buck has a thin neck, a head held high, long legs and a straight back. Every part of him looks separate, like a teenager who hasn't grown into himself. In his prime, about five to seven, the neck is thick and blends into the shoulder, and the legs look short under a deep barrel. An old buck has a sagging belly, a back that dips in the middle, and a heavy head carried low.

Now, October. In the weeks after a buck casts, from September into November, an antlerless deer isn't necessarily a doe. Look under the belly for the brush, and at the throat and neck, which on a mature buck are heavier than any doe's.

The does will be heavily pregnant. A doe carries her fawn for about two hundred and thirty days, so an April rut puts fawns on the ground from late November into January, most of them in December. And if you ever find a fawn on its own, it usually isn't abandoned. The doe comes back to feed it. Leave it where it is.

The antler year7:10

A head of antlers grows from two permanent stalks of bone on the skull, called the pedicles. Every year the antler grows, hardens, gets used, and drops off at the join. Then a new one grows from the same stump.

Learn the parts low to high. The knobbly ring at the base is the coronet. The main shaft is the beam. The first point, just above the coronet and angled forward over the face, is the brow tine. The second forward point is the trez. Above that, the beam flattens into the palm, with a row of points down its back edge called spellers.

Antler is bone, and it's dropped and regrown every year. Horn is different. It's a sheath of keratin, the stuff of fingernails, over a core of living bone, and it's kept for life. Tahr and chamois carry horns, and you'll be counting the growth rings on them in New Zealand.

Here, the fallow year runs like this. The rut is in April. The bucks cast in October and November, the oldest first. The new antlers grow in velvet over summer, and they're clean by about February. So on this trip you'll see bucks in full hard antler, and others with nothing but two raw stumps.

The growth is remarkable. Antler is the only mammal organ that grows back complete every year, and researchers rank it among the fastest growing tissue in the animal kingdom. A fallow buck can put on up to seventy centimetres of antler in three or four months.

And it isn't knocked off. The bone at the join is broken down from below until the antler lets go. Pick up a cast one and the base is rough and slightly domed. Cast antlers in the grass are fair game on private land with the owner's say-so. Ask first.

Australia and New Zealand score a head by the Douglas system. Only the shorter side of each measurement counts, doubled, so an extra inch on one side earns nothing. The Australian Deer Association calls a fallow head over two hundred a trophy, and over two hundred and twenty-five exceptional.

More than six hundred years ago, the oldest English book on hunting, The Master of Game, gave up describing a fallow buck's head in words. "His head cannot be well described without painting," it said. Once you've seen one, you'll understand.

Keep the wind in your face, and we'll pick it up in episode two.

Opening0:00

Nobody is watching at last light. That's the whole test.

This is Lore and Lead. Episode two. Where the bullet goes, and the pass.

Five parts to this one. Where to put the bullet on a deer, and why we hold a little higher than the old books. How the angle changes it. What happens after the shot. Roos, which are shot differently. And the hardest skill in hunting, which is not shooting at all.

The middle of the chest0:31

The heart and lungs sit in the front third of the deer, inside the ribs, just behind the front leg. Hunters call them the vitals. Put a bullet through them and blood pressure falls away fast, which is the whole job. Miss them by a hand and you're into the shoulder bones, the liver or the gut, and that's the start of a long night.

A lot of hunting education still teaches you to aim a third of the way up from the bottom of the chest, tight behind the front leg. That's the heart shot. We hold higher: half way up, in the middle of the chest, just behind the line of the front leg. So does the current Australian standard.

The reason is bone. From the side, the shoulder blade and the upper leg partly cover the heart, so a heart-height shot tight behind the leg can meet bone first. Half way up, the bullet goes through ribs and straight into both lungs, the biggest organ in the animal, with the top of the heart and the big vessels just below. Land a little high and you're still in lung. A little low is heart. A little back is still lung.

On a grown buck, the zone you can count on is a circle about twenty centimetres across. Roughly a paper plate. It's smaller on a doe or a yearling, and it doesn't get any bigger with distance. Everything else about range, rests and wind comes back to that circle.

To be straight about it, nobody has run a field trial of a third up against half way up. The shift is about a hand's width, and both points sit inside the vital zone. The middle is the sensible centre, not a magic spot.

The angle decides2:14

A deer isn't a target board. The vitals are a lump inside a barrel, and a bullet is a straight line. Whether the line finds them depends on which way the animal is standing.

Broadside is the best shot there is: the shortest path, the least bone, both lungs. Quartering away is good, with the right line. The bullet goes in behind the near shoulder and travels forward through both lungs, so aim to have it come out at the far front leg.

Quartering towards you, the shoulder blade and upper leg are in the way. Wait for it to turn. Facing you, it's possible but small, and only with the head up. Most of the time, wait. And going away, never. The only line to the vitals runs through the hindquarters and the whole length of the gut.

Slopes change it again. Shoot down at a deer below you and the bullet goes in high on the near side and comes out low on the far side. So think about where the bullet comes out, not just where it goes in.

After the shot3:26

A chest-shot animal dies from blood loss. That's fast, but not instant. The New South Wales deer standard puts it at seconds to over a minute, and a lung-shot deer often runs before it drops, commonly within fifty metres and sometimes as far as a hundred and fifty. Plenty of people have called a clean kill a miss because the animal ran.

So assume every animal you shoot at was hit, until a proper search says otherwise, and do five things in order. Watch: stay in the scope through the shot and see the reaction. Reload, without taking your eye off the animal. Mark where it stood and the last place you saw it, a tree or a rock, and mark where you shot from too. Wait: a few minutes if it's down in sight, at least half an hour if it's out of sight. Then go in from behind, rifle ready.

The reaction tells you a lot. A kick of the hind legs and a flat-out dash with the head low usually means heart and lungs. A deer that hunches, walks off stiffly and beds down with its head up has been hit in the liver or the gut. That one gets hours, not minutes, because a wounded animal that's pushed runs further and lies up deeper. And if a deer drops on the spot, then the head comes back up, you've clipped the spine or the top of the neck. Shoot again, now.

Don't chase. Most of the work of a good follow-up happens in the first minute, with your eyes.

Roos5:02

Roos are shot differently, and not as a matter of taste. In New South Wales, roo shooting on a landholder's licence is held to the national code of practice, and with a rifle the code allows one target: the brain.

The roo has to be standing, still and clearly visible. The range is two hundred metres at most, for a .223 or similar with a soft or hollow point, and that's a ceiling, not a target. The brain sits in a little oval between the eye and the base of the ear, only a few centimetres across, on a head that moves. From a good rest at a hundred metres it's a precise shot. At two hundred, plenty of people shouldn't take it.

The ute stops before anyone shoots. Never from a moving vehicle. One roo at a time: if one is wounded, everything stops until it's found and finished. And if a female is shot, her pouch is checked straight away. Matt or Leif will handle that part. It isn't pleasant, and it isn't optional.

The pass6:11

Most of good shooting is not shooting. The animal you pass on is still there tomorrow. The one you wound isn't, and nobody gets to take that shot back.

Every shot clears the same short list. It's standing still. Nothing is in the way: no twigs, no grass, no fence wire. There's earth behind it, never sky. It's inside your range, which is the distance where you put your first shot inside that twenty centimetre circle, from the position you're actually in, every time. Nothing is standing behind it. You're sure what it is. There's enough light to see the whole animal. You're on a solid rest. It's broadside or quartering away. And you can get to it afterwards. One no is enough.

The numbers back it up. A British study logged two thousand two hundred and eighty-one first shots at deer, by a hundred and two stalkers. Off shooting sticks they hit ninety-six per cent of the time, and freehand eighty-seven. Under seventy-five metres they hit ninety-five per cent, and past a hundred and fifty, eighty-three. The stalkers who practised at least once a month hit with ninety-five per cent of their first shots. The rest managed seventy-nine. Practice is the cheapest accuracy there is.

One call comes up every spring trip. A doe is legal in October, and she's also heavily pregnant. Good hunters land on both sides of that one. The only wrong move is deciding on your own on somebody else's place. Ask your guide before you shoot a doe, not after.

And if it's your first animal, it's your call, every time. If you hesitate, that's telling you something. The animal walking away costs nothing.

That's where the bullet goes, and in episode three we head out after dark.

Opening0:00

A spotlight shows you the animal. It doesn't show you what's behind it.

This is Lore and Lead. Episode three. After dark.

Most of the weekend's shooting happens off the back of the ute at night. It's the easiest hunting there is, and the most crowded. So this is the safety episode: the rules, the ute and the words used on it, the driving, eyes in the dark, what stops a bullet, and what happens after the bang.

The rules0:32

Every firearm safety rule in the world was written backwards from an accident. That's why they all say much the same thing, and why none of them is optional. New South Wales teaches eight fundamentals, New Zealand has seven rules, and as one list they go like this.

Treat every firearm as loaded, including the one you just watched someone unload. Check it yourself. Always point it in a safe direction, somewhere a bullet would stop harmlessly with nobody in the way. Load only when you're ready to fire. Identify your target beyond all doubt, and what's beyond it. Keep your finger off the trigger, straight along the side of the stock, until the sights are on the animal and you've decided. Never rely on the safety. Use it, always, but it's a part, and parts fail. Store and carry firearms and ammunition separately. And never handle a firearm under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Three on the ute1:34

Spotlighting works because animals that would be gone in daylight will often stand and stare into a light. That buys you time, and the whole craft is spending it well.

The New South Wales handbook sets the team at three: a driver, a shooter, and someone on the light. No more than three, and the shooter always in front of the light. On this weekend the driver drives, a guide runs the light and calls the shot, and you shoot. You stand at the front of the tray with the rifle on the roll bar, and the light comes over your shoulder. That way you're not looking into it, the light points where the scope points, and nobody is beside or ahead of the muzzle.

While the wheels turn, every rifle is empty and upright, muzzle to the sky, and everyone in the tray sits or holds the rail. Then each stop runs on a handful of short words, and each one means one thing. The light says "eyes", and roughly where and how far. The driver stops and says "stopped": handbrake on, engine off. The light says "hold", and everyone stays still while the animal is worked out. Then the light names the animal and the shooter. "Fallow buck. Your shot." Only then do you chamber a round, on the rest. When you're set, you say "on", and the centre of the beam goes onto the animal and stays dead still.

Two words beat everything. "No shot", from the shooter or the light, means safety on and unload, and nobody has to explain it. And anyone can call "stop". After the shot, or the no shot, the shooter unloads, shows the empty rifle to the light, and says "clear". Only then does the ute move, or anyone climb down.

Keep it upright3:30

Here's the line that should change how you think about the night. The New South Wales hunter education handbook says vehicle rollovers while spotlighting are the highest reported hunting incidents in the state. Not a bullet. A ute on its side in the dark, with people in the back who have no seatbelts.

So the driver's job is mostly saying no. The tracks we drive at night are tracks we've driven by day. Walking pace, on the track. The driver watches the ground in front of the wheels, not the beam, and stops before looking at anything the light has found. Slopes are taken straight up and straight down, never across the face, and never with a turn on them. Gullies and washouts are crossed square, at a crawl.

And everyone sits whenever the ute moves. Standing in the tray lifts the weight and takes away the margin, and a hidden washout under the downhill wheel does the rest.

Eyes in the dark4:33

A spotlight is two lights in one. The bright centre is what you identify and aim in. Around it is a much wider, dimmer spill, and the spill finds eyes. Behind the retina of a deer, a fox, a cow or a dog sits a reflective layer that throws light straight back to the lamp. So eyes show up long before you can make out the animal they belong to.

That's the gift, and the trap. Eyeshine tells you something is there. It doesn't tell you what. A cow's eyes, a dog's, a reflector on a fence post and a mate's head torch all come back out of the dark looking much the same. The handbook says it in one line: never fire at a pair of eyes or a reflection. If all you can see is eyes, the light holds and waits for the animal to show itself. If it doesn't, it's no shot.

Of the forty-one hunters who died in New Zealand from 2007 to 2016, nine were shot by someone who thought they were an animal. In eighty per cent of those shootings the shooter and the victim were in the same party, and in ninety-two per cent they were less than seventy-five metres apart. That's mates, close, with someone certain of what he saw. New Zealand's code puts it plainly: no meat or no trophy is better than no mate.

One more light to manage is your own. On the tray, your head torch stays off, or on red. A white one kills everyone's night eyes, and puts a glowing point where it can be taken for a pair of eyes. On the ground it's the opposite: white, and on, so the ute always knows where you are.

Past the target6:23

Every shot has two destinations: the animal you aim at, and whatever stops the bullet. Before you fire, you should be able to point at the second one.

At night you can't judge the backstop from the tray, because the beam shows you almost nothing behind the animal. So the ground has to be known. That's what the daylight drive around the block is for: where the banks are, where the boundary runs and where the stock are.

A steep bank of earth is the backstop you want. Never a crest, where you can't see what's over the top. Never water, which a low shot skips off like a stone. And never the granite slabs and boulders this country is full of. Rock throws bullets and fragments sideways, and back towards you.

A bullet goes a long way. Fire a .308 dead level from a ute tray, and it comes down roughly four hundred and fifty metres away. At the worst angle, New Zealand's code says it can carry about four kilometres.

After the bang7:28

At night the animal is out of the beam in two bounds, and everything looks the same in every direction. So the routine after the shot never changes.

Stay in the scope and watch. Work the bolt without taking your eye off the animal. The light stays on it, and if it runs, the light follows it as far as it can, then goes back to the spot where it stood.

The ute is the firing point, so it doesn't move. Pick a landmark in the beam where the animal stood, a stump or a pale tussock, and say it out loud so everyone has the same one. Then wait: a few minutes if it's down in sight, at least half an hour if it's out of sight.

Before anyone climbs down, every rifle on the ute is unloaded and shown clear. The walker goes up the beam with a white head torch on, and comes at the animal from behind, away from the legs. If the trail thins out, or the blood says liver or gut, stop, mark the last sign, and come back at first light. Pushing a wounded animal through the dark is how it gets lost for good.

Ears and a clear head8:41

An unsuppressed .308 is about a hundred and sixty-five decibels at the shooter, and anything past a hundred and forty can damage hearing instantly. The damage adds up, and it doesn't heal. Ear plugs are supplied. They go in before the first stop and stay in until the rifles are away, for everyone on the ute, the driver included.

And the rule the whole trip runs on: the rifles and the drinking never overlap. In New South Wales, handling a firearm under the influence carries up to five years in prison. So the end of the night is fixed. Rifles unloaded, proved clear and locked away. Then a drink, if you want one. Matt and Leif are both off it, so there's no pressure either way.

That's after dark done properly, and in episode four we zero the rifle.

Opening0:00

A zero is a promise at one distance. Everywhere else, you're trusting a curve.

This is Lore and Lead. Episode four. Zeroing, and your rifle.

In this one: how a bolt action works, the rifles on the rack, what a zero actually is and how to get one, the glass on top, and how to hold the thing still. Then the app that does the sums for you.

The machine0:28

A bolt-action rifle is a steel tube with a door at the back. You open the door, slide a cartridge in, close it and lock it. Squeeze the trigger and a spring-driven pin hits the back of the cartridge. That's the whole idea, and the design is well over a century old.

Loading and unloading are the same four movements of your hand. Lift, back, forward, down. Lift the handle to free the bolt. Draw it back, all the way, and the empty case flies out. Push it forward to strip a round off the magazine into the chamber. Turn it down to lock it. Practise them with an empty rifle until you can do them without looking, with the muzzle somewhere safe the whole time.

Two things to know cold. A rifle with rounds in its magazine is a loaded rifle, even with the chamber empty. And the safety is a small mechanical lever, and mechanical parts fail. A muzzle pointed somewhere safe is the real safety.

New Zealand's code gives a rifle four states, and the guides use them. Load means rounds in the magazine, the chamber empty, safety on. Action means a round in the chamber, only when a shot is close. Instant means safety off, crosshair on the target, about to fire. And unload means magazine and chamber emptied, then checked by looking and by feeling.

The rack1:59

At Silent Grove you'll shoot a 6.5 Creedmoor and a .223. The 6.5 is the deer rifle: accurate, flat and gentle, and the one new shooters shoot well. Its hundred and forty-three grain bullet leaves the muzzle at about eight hundred and twenty metres a second, roughly two and a half times the speed of sound.

The .223 is for foxes and roos. It's light, cheap to feed, and it barely kicks, but it's too light for deer. The floor for fallow in New South Wales guidance is a .243 with an eighty grain bullet. The classic deer cartridge, the .308, makes a good yardstick. It hits harder close in, with more kick, and its soft point sheds speed sooner.

Wind is where they part company. A gentle ten kilometre an hour breeze from straight across pushes the 6.5 about ten centimetres at three hundred metres, the .308 about twenty, and the little .223 about twenty-five. That's more than the whole heart and lung zone. If you can't read the wind, get closer.

In New Zealand the rifles step up for longer shots across valleys: a 6.5 PRC and a .270, both suppressed, and both on bipods. Everything else in this episode applies there too.

A word on the bullet. A hunting bullet has two jobs that pull against each other. It has to open up, to about twice its width, and it has to hold together long enough to get through hide and ribs. Varmint bullets are built to come apart. Right for a fox, wrong for a deer, out of any calibre.

The zero3:46

A scope doesn't look where the barrel points. It sits about four centimetres above the bore, looking dead straight, while the barrel is tipped up a fraction. The bullet never rises. It starts falling the instant it leaves the muzzle, and it only climbs relative to your line of sight because the barrel was pointed slightly up. With a two hundred metre zero, the path crosses your crosshair twice: once on the way up, about twenty-five metres out, and again at two hundred on the way down.

Scopes measure in angles, because a miss grows with distance. One minute of angle covers about two point nine centimetres at a hundred metres. A typical hunting scope clicks in quarter minutes, so each click moves the shot about seven millimetres at a hundred. The other unit is the mil, ten centimetres at a hundred metres, and a mil scope clicks in tenths: one click, one centimetre. Here's one for the fire. An Australian twenty cent coin at a hundred metres covers almost exactly one minute of angle. Three shots under a twenty cent coin is as good as most hunters will ever need.

Sighting in goes like this. Check the mounts are tight and your eye sits naturally behind the scope. Fire a careful group at twenty-five metres and bring it to the mark. Then at a hundred metres, fire three careful shots from a solid rest. Measure from the centre of the group, never from your best shot. Turn each turret the way its arrow points for where you want the shots to go: up to raise them, right to move them right. Then shoot again to confirm, and write it down.

A hundred or two hundred? Zeroed at a hundred, the 6.5 is twelve and a half centimetres low at two hundred, and forty-four low at three hundred. Zeroed at two hundred, it's about six centimetres high at a hundred, dead on at two hundred, and twenty-five low at three hundred. That lets you hold straight on a deer's chest out to about two hundred and forty metres without thinking about it.

And check it every day. A knock, a rough drive, a helicopter ride or new ammunition can all move a zero, and the kangaroo code requires a check before every day's or night's shooting. Pay most attention to where the first shot of the session lands. A hunting shot is almost always the first one from a cold barrel.

The glass6:21

The two numbers on binoculars tell you nearly everything. In eight by forty-two, the eight is the magnification, and the forty-two is the width of each front lens in millimetres. Divide one by the other and you get the exit pupil, the disc of light that reaches your eye. Five and a quarter millimetres is a good match for an adult eye at dusk, which is the hour deer move.

The rule that matters most: binoculars find, the scope confirms. Never glass with a riflescope. Whoever you're looking at through it is looking down your barrel.

Then turn the scope down. A shot on a fallow at a hundred metres in timber needs three or four power, a wide picture that finds the deer fast. Wound up to nine, the same scope shows you a patch of brown hair and a shaky crosshair. At night, keep it low.

And mind your eye. A scope wants your eye about eight to ten centimetres behind it. Creep closer, which happens lying down or shooting uphill, and the recoil drives the eyepiece into your eyebrow. It's called scope bite. It leaves a crescent-shaped cut, and a flinch for years.

Behind the rifle7:40

Once the rifle's zeroed, the thing deciding whether you hit is you. The rifle can hold a group the size of a twenty cent coin. What spreads it out is a wobbly position, a breath held too long, a snatched trigger, and a flinch.

So rest the fore-end, never the barrel: a bag, a pack, a bipod or the ute rail, padded. Rest on something hard and the rifle bounces off it as it fires. Settle so the crosshair sits on the target with your muscles relaxed. Breathe out, and let the natural pause at the bottom of the breath arrive. Press straight back, slowly, and let the shot surprise you. Then keep your eye in the scope, work the bolt, and keep watching the animal.

A flinch comes from bracing for the kick before the shot breaks. The cures are dull, and they work. Hold the rifle firmly into your shoulder. Wear earplugs, because the noise drives a flinch as much as the shove. And start on the .223. It barely moves, so you learn to keep your eye open and watch the shot land.

The Dope app8:54

Once you have a zero, the next job is knowing where your own rifle and load land further out, in the day's weather. That's what the Dope app is for. It's an offline ballistic calculator. Give it your rifle, your load and your scope's clicks, and it tells you what to dial or hold at each distance. It keeps working with no reception, on the bench or on the hill.

The numbers in this episode come from three factory loads in standard air. Your rifle, your ammunition and the day's temperature and height will all move them. So put your own numbers in the app, and check them on paper.

That's the rifle, and in episode five we go from the field to the freezer.

Opening0:00

The shot ends the hunt and starts the job. What you do in the next hour decides whether the meat comes out clean, mild and tender, or turns into something you quietly feed to the dog.

This is Lore and Lead. Episode five. Field to freezer.

Six stops on the way: making sure, the gralloch, reading the insides, getting the heat out, the bench on Sunday, and the esky home.

Make sure first0:29

Wait and watch first. A deer that drops can still be alive, and a kicking hind leg with a sharp hoof on the end will open your shin to the bone. Walk in from behind its back, away from the legs and the antlers, with the rifle still loaded in case it needs a second shot.

Then make sure. Watch the chest for breathing. Touch the surface of the eye with the end of a stick. No blink, no flicker, and it's dead. Only then unload, with the muzzle somewhere safe.

Take your photos now, before the knife, while the animal still looks like itself. Tuck the tongue in. Wipe the blood off the nose and the wound. Fold the legs under so it lies naturally, and sit or kneel behind it, never on it. Those photos should show that you respected the animal. And keep anything that shows where you are out of them. That's the landholder's privacy.

Then be quick. In hot sun an intact carcass can start to spoil inside fifteen minutes. At ten degrees or below you have about an hour. A few photos, then the knife.

The gralloch1:45

Gralloch is a Scots word, from the Gaelic for the entrails, with the soft ch at the end, as in loch. To gralloch a deer is to take out everything in its body cavity in one piece, without opening the stomach, the bowel or the bladder. Done quickly and cleanly, it gets the heat out and keeps the gut away from the meat.

Two rules cover most of it. Keep the knife sharp and the blade shallow, so it only cuts what you mean it to. And wear gloves, changing them when they get dirty, because some of what lives in a deer can live in you.

The order matters more than the speed. Roll it onto its back and wedge it. Open the throat and tie off the gullet, the soft food pipe beside the hard, ridged windpipe. Cut a ring around the bung, free it and tie it off, then change your gloves. Open the belly from the inside out: a small nick, two fingers in a V, and the blade edge up between them, back to the pelvis, with your fingers holding the paunch away from the edge. Lift the bladder out whole, pinched shut. Roll the gut out of the side of the cavity, using fingers rather than the knife. And the chest comes last. Cut the diaphragm close to the ribs, and draw out the heart, lungs and windpipe in one piece, because that's where the blood has pooled.

Then tip it to drain, wipe the cavity with a clean cloth, and cut away anything dirty or bloodshot. Don't hose it out. Water spreads bacteria and keeps the surface wet. Trim, don't wash.

Read the insides3:26

In the paddock, nobody inspects the carcass for you. The gralloch is when you do it, because the organs are in your hands anyway. The good news is that the great majority of deer are healthy and become food.

Start before the shot. A deer that was staggering, circling, drooling or strangely tame shouldn't be eaten, whatever its insides look like. Then the organs. A healthy liver is firm and smooth, an even deep red-brown, with sharp edges. White spots, gritty tracks or flat leaf-shaped worms mean liver fluke. Bin the liver, and if the rest looks normal, keep going. A healthy heart is firm and dark red, with a cap of white fat. Lungs should be pink and spongy.

What condemns the lot is a problem everywhere. Swollen glands or abscesses all through the carcass, hot swollen joints, or a sour smell mean disease, not a local problem. Don't eat it. Blisters in the mouth or round the feet are a call to the Emergency Animal Disease Watch Hotline, on 1800 675 888. And an animal found dead, with blood at the nose, gets left alone and reported.

Two rules for the dogs at the bench. No raw offal, ever, because that's how dogs pick up hydatid tapeworm, and dogs are how people catch it. And nothing from around the wound, because bullet fragments travel well beyond the bloodshot meat you cut out.

Here's one for the fire. Look for the gall bladder on a deer's liver and you won't find one. Deer don't have them.

Get the heat out5:12

Food bacteria grow fastest between five and sixty degrees, the danger zone, and a fallow runs at about thirty-eight or thirty-nine right through. Your job for the next day is to get the heat out of the deepest muscle on the animal, the haunch, by the hip. The target is seven degrees or less within twenty-four hours. That's the benchmark the New South Wales hunter handbook gives hunters.

The skin is a blanket. Taking it off while the carcass is warm speeds cooling, which is why, on this weekend, whatever's down is skinned and hung before anyone sleeps. Hung up with the cavity propped open, it cools from every side. And never pile warm carcasses on each other. A stack holds heat like a compost heap.

Here's the trap. A carcass can never get colder than the air around it, and Tenterfield's average October low is eight degrees, reached around dawn. Night air alone will never get a deer to seven. It buys you time, and the cool room finishes the job.

Don't overdo it early, either. Chill a hot backstrap hard before the muscle stiffens, and it locks short and tough, so no ice slurry and no freezer for it.

Then let it hang. Venison is naturally tender, and fallow rarely needs more than one to three days of ageing. Shot on Friday or Saturday night, hung, then broken down on Sunday. That's right in the window.

The bench6:47

On Sunday every carcass comes out of the cool room, and you take it apart yourself, naming each cut as it comes off.

Skinning is mostly fists. Hair on the meat is the enemy, so cut from the inside out, blade under the skin and edge up, and use the knife only where the hide is stuck. Then come the primals, the big first pieces, following the natural seams between muscles instead of sawing across them. The tenderloins come out first, because they dry quickly. Then the shoulders, which aren't joined to the ribs by any joint, so they come off without a saw. Then the backstraps, the haunches, the neck, the ribs and the shanks.

One rule tells you how to cook all of it. Lazy muscles fast, working muscles slow. The backstrap, the tenderloin, the rump and the topside did little work in life, so sear them hard and keep them pink. Cooks pull a backstrap at fifty-four to fifty-seven degrees for medium-rare, and rest it. Australia's official line for a whole cut is sixty-three degrees and a rest, so rare is a choice, with a known risk. Venison has almost no fat, so past medium it dries out.

The neck, shoulders and shanks carried the animal all day, and they're laced with collagen. Give them hours of low, moist heat, until the meat falls apart. The neck is the cut most often wasted. Braise it whole on the bone, then shred it.

The rest becomes mince, and it's the biggest pile on the bench. Add fat: twenty to thirty per cent pork back fat for sausages, ten to twenty for burgers, and two per cent salt. Mince, sausages and offal get cooked right through, to seventy-five degrees.

The esky8:42

Everything worth keeping gets vacuum sealed. No air means no freezer burn. Pack it in meal sizes, laid flat, and write on every bag: the cut, the date and the animal. In four months you won't remember which one held the backstrap.

For the drive, the meat goes in cold and sealed, with ice underneath and ice on top, because cold air sinks through the load. Heads and hides stay out of it, and the esky stays in the shade. And drain the melt water at every stop. Meat sits on ice, never in water.

At home it all goes into the freezer that night, at minus eighteen or colder, in single flat layers so it freezes fast. Thaw it in the fridge, never on the bench.

How much comes home? Less than people think. A fallow gives you roughly thirty-five to forty per cent of its live weight as meat you can bag, so a young doe of forty-five kilos comes home as sixteen to eighteen kilos of meat. And every bit of it is meat you actually met.

That's field to freezer, and next up is New Zealand, starting with the tahr.

Opening0:00

Every wild tahr in New Zealand comes from fewer than twenty animals. With no snow leopards and nobody allowed to shoot them, they did what anything does with nothing chasing it.

This is Lore and Lead. Episode six. Tahr.

Six things for the flight: where they came from, bull or nanny, a bull's age off his horns, where they spend the day, why so many people are shooting them, and the question to ask before the shot.

Seventeen tahr and a duke0:30

Himalayan tahr are wild goats from the central Himalaya, the mountains of India and Nepal. The species name comes from the Jemla hills of Nepal. At home they're listed as near threatened. Here, the problem has always run the other way.

In 1904 the Duke of Bedford gave the New Zealand Government six tahr from his herd at Woburn in England. One bull was lost on the voyage, and the other five were let go near the Hermitage at Aoraki Mount Cook. Eight more followed in 1909, and four from Wellington Zoo in 1919. The idea was sport, and overseas hunters with money to spend. The tahr were fully protected, and with nothing chasing them, they spread.

Protection came off in 1930, because of the damage to alpine plants, and government shooters started in 1937. Then came the helicopter years. Crews shooting tahr for the game meat trade took the herd from about fifty thousand to about two thousand by 1983, and the government stopped commercial hunting to save it. In 1993 a control plan capped the herd at ten thousand. It was meant to be reviewed after five years. It still governs.

Here's one for the fire. The 1993 plan spells the name with the h straight after the t. In 1962 the hunting writer Bruce Banwell argued that the h belongs after the a. It took a while, but his spelling won.

Bull, nanny, kid2:07

Tahr are goats, not deer, and both sexes carry horns, which catches people out. The horns are kept for life and grow every year. What separates a bull from a nanny at a glance is size and hair.

A mature bull is a heavy, deep-chested animal on short legs. He usually tops seventy kilos, and the odd big bull gets to about a hundred and thirty. In winter he wears a mane of long hair over his neck, shoulders and chest, hanging almost to his knees. A mature bull also has a near-black face, dark hindquarters, and two pale stripes either side of the spine.

A nanny seldom tops thirty-six kilos. She has a short coat like a farm goat, slimmer horns, and no mane at all. Nannies, kids and young animals run together, while mature bulls spend most of the year in bachelor groups.

October is spring up there. The winter coats are coming out, so they look much paler. The nannies are heavily pregnant, with kids due around the start of December, and the bulls are past their best pelt.

And listen out. Tahr are almost silent. The one sound you're likely to hear is a sharp, high whistle, and they keep it for alarm. If you hear it, so did everything else on the face.

Count the rings3:33

A tahr's horn is a diary. It grows from the base, not the tip, so the tip is the oldest part. Every winter, growth stops for a while and leaves a ring. No ring forms in a kid's first winter, and tahr are born around the start of December. Put that together and the rule is simple. Count the rings, and add one and a half for his age at the winter rut. By our October trip he may carry one more ring than he did in winter, and that's close enough to tell a young bull from a mature one, which is what matters.

Horn length alone fools people. Young bulls can already carry nine to twelve inches. What gives a young bull away is a narrow body, an even colour, and a scruffy neck rather than a mane. The hunting groups ask you to take mature bulls, and leave the young ones to grow.

Thirteen inches is the record-book mark. In a sample of one thousand six hundred and ninety-five bulls from the nineteen seventies, only fifteen got there, and every one was at least five. That's under one in a hundred. The New Zealand record, a ten-year-old taken in June 2024, carried fifteen and seven-eighths.

So through the spotter, run the list. A full mane, hanging well down the front legs. Dark hindquarters and a near-black face. A heavy body, wide across the back. Rings stacked tight at the base, which is one of the surest signs of age. Tips broken or broomed. Look at him side on and from behind, because horns always look bigger from behind. Still in doubt? Get closer, or let him go. Your guide has looked at hundreds of bulls. Ask.

Bluffs and basins5:27

Tahr country is the steep ground around and above the bushline, where rock bluffs break up faces of snow tussock and scrub. The bluffs are the point. They're the escape route, the bed and the lookout, and tahr are never far from them. Snow tussock is the staple, about thirty per cent of what they eat.

They keep a timetable. On the eastern side of the Main Divide, one nanny herd fed low at dawn, climbed through the morning, bedded high among the bluffs at midday, and fed back down in the afternoon. On the West Coast, where the scrub is thick and the helicopters are regular, they often flip it. They shelter below the bushline through the day, then feed up onto the tussock and slips in the evening. So on the Coast, the evening is the time to be behind the glass, watching the bush edges.

The Mount Cook lily is worth a look while you're up there. It isn't a lily at all. It's the largest buttercup in the world, it grows only in New Zealand, and tahr eat it.

Ten thousand6:33

The 1993 plan sets a ceiling of ten thousand tahr across the whole range. The Department of Conservation's 2023 survey found about twenty-nine thousand eight hundred on public land alone. The argument about how many New Zealand should carry is very much alive.

On one side, New Zealand's alpine plants grew up without large browsing mammals, and a big group of tahr eats and tramples them. On the other, hunters say ten thousand was a best guess that was never reviewed, and they point to how much of the control they do themselves.

What matters for us is where we hunt. In the national parks, DOC's aim is as close to zero as practicable, and every tahr its shooters meet is shot, bulls included. This year its aerial control finishes across the range by the thirteenth of November. So a bull still standing in mid-October has come through most of a season of it. Nobody can promise you one, and a mature bull alive in a national park in spring has earned his place on the wall.

Where it will fall7:42

On the tops, the shot is often easy. Getting him back is the hard part.

Before the safety comes off, look past the animal. If you hit him well, where does he go? Bull tahr are hard to stop when they're disturbed or poorly hit, so assume a few steps and a roll. If the answer is over a bluff, down a gut or into a river, the shot is off, however easy it looks. It costs you the horns and the cape, and the retrieval is a fall waiting to happen.

Never shoot a bull from directly below. In one account the Mountain Safety Council published, a bull shot about two hundred metres upslope rolled and brought rocks down onto the hunters. Where the ground allows, finish level with him, or above.

The mane makes his chest look much deeper than it is. Ignore the hair. Find the front leg, follow its back edge up into the body, and hold in the middle of the animal underneath. And mind the slope. Your rangefinder might read four hundred metres up a thirty degree face, but for drop that's a three hundred and forty-six metre shot. Hold for four hundred and you'll go high, uphill or downhill alike. Use the angle mode, or better still, get closer.

After the shot, keep the scope on him until he stops, and fix the spot against a rock or a patch of snow. Plan the route in with the guide, because the straight line is rarely the safe one. Come in from above or the side, never from below. And wedge him or tie him off before the photos, so he can't slide.

In the sixteen years to 2025, ten of the eleven alpine hunters who died in New Zealand died in falls. No bull is worth it. If the guide says the retrieval is off, it's off.

That's the tahr, and next time it's the mountain itself.

Opening0:00

The thing most likely to hurt you on the tops isn't the rifle, and it isn't the weather on its own. It's the ground.

This is Lore and Lead. Episode seven. The mountain.

Six things for the flight over: the helicopter, glassing, which way the air goes, the weather, the ground and the rivers, and knowing when the honest answer is no.

The machine0:27

The trip starts and ends with a helicopter, and for most people it's the first time they've stood near one with the blades turning. It's the most dangerous machine you'll go near all week, and most of the danger comes from noise and wind pushing you into doing something without thinking.

One rule covers almost everything. Nobody moves towards a running helicopter until the pilot, or whoever's loading it, waves them in. Not when the skids touch, and not when the door opens. You wait, crouched, where the pilot can see you.

Think of the machine as a clock seen from above, with the nose at twelve. From about ten round to two you're in the pilot's view, and that's the way in and the way out. Behind the doors you're invisible, and back there is the tail rotor, which spins so fast it's almost invisible too. On a slope, you come in and go out on the downhill side, never the uphill one, because the ground rises towards the blades.

Walk, don't run. Anything long, rifle cases and poles included, is carried flat and below the waist. If your hat blows off, let it go. And rifles are unloaded, always, in or anywhere near the machine.

Never push the pilot. Helicopters don't fly into cloud, so either end of the trip can slide a day. In November 2015 a scenic flight crashed on the Fox Glacier in deteriorating weather, and seven people died. A weather hold costs a day. Nobody talks a pilot into a gap in the cloud.

Sit down and look2:13

Hunting the tops is mostly sitting still and looking. You climb to a spot that sees across and down into the country, you sit, and you work the binoculars over it slowly. Most animals are found from a seat, not on the move. Walking around hoping to bump into one is how you see the back end of everything leaving.

Brace the glass: elbows on knees, binoculars on the pack, or on a tripod. Work the face in strips, near to far and left to right, holding each view for a few seconds. Look for pieces, not animals. A horizontal line in vertical country, the flick of an ear, legs under a bush, something the wrong colour. The binoculars find. The spotting scope decides: bull or nanny, young or old, and whether he's worth the climb.

Then look again later, because animals that were lying down or out of sight will have moved. The Deerstalkers' advice is to spend the first day glassing before you climb anything.

Which way the air goes3:18

An animal that smells you is gone. On flat country the wind is the wind. In the mountains there's a second, smaller wind underneath it that changes direction on a timetable. It's called a thermal.

At night the slopes cool, chill the air touching them, and that cold, heavy air drains downhill like water. Once the sun gets onto a face it warms the ground, and the air starts to climb. That's barely a breeze, a few metres a second, but it's plenty to carry your scent a long way.

So the rule goes like this. In the morning, while the air is draining, come at an animal from below, because your scent is sliding down the hill away from it. In the afternoon, with the sun on the face and the air climbing, come from above. And watch for the flip. When your face goes into shade, the air starts to drain again, and a stalk that started in one wind can finish in the other. In mid October, sunrise is about a quarter to seven, and sunset is about eight.

Two exceptions. The big wind beats the little wind: when a real wind is blowing, like a nor'wester over the tops, it overrides the thermals. And ice makes its own wind. Near glaciers and big snowfields, the air can keep sliding downhill even on a sunny day. So check the air every time you stop.

Weather off the Tasman4:50

The West Coast sits straight in the path of the westerlies, with nothing between it and Australia but the Tasman Sea. Moist air hits the Southern Alps, is forced up, cools, and drops its water on the western side. The park can get up to five metres of rain in a year.

October is about as wet as it gets. Up at fifteen hundred metres, across the last ten Octobers, the average day got to under six degrees, the average night went below zero, more than half of all nights froze, and it rained on more than half the days. Plan for that, and anything better is a gift.

A front comes through in four acts. First the nor'wester: warm, wet and windy, and a gale on the ridges while it still feels fine down low. Then heavy rain, which lifts the rivers fast. That's a hut day. Then the southwest change. The temperature drops hard, showers fall as snow on the tops, and the freezing level can drop more than a kilometre in a day. Then the clearance: clear skies, a hard frost, fresh snow, and rivers on the way down. The best glassing day of the week often comes straight after the worst one, which is why you don't waste the bad one getting hurt.

The number the guide watches is the freezing level, the height where the air drops to zero. Above it, rain is snow and wet rock is ice. The air cools by about seven tenths of a degree for every hundred metres you climb, so the tops run nine or ten degrees colder than the coast, and the township forecast tells you very little about where you'll be. Bad conditions mean a day of glassing from somewhere safe, or a day in the hut. That's a normal day, not a wasted one.

Ground that bites6:48

The New Zealand Mountain Safety Council looked at sixteen years of alpine hunting deaths, and found that ten of the eleven hunters who died fell. The coroners keep coming back to the same two things: complacency, and being set on a goal.

So learn the ground that does it. Wet snowgrass is the most underrated danger up there. Wet or frosted, walking on it is like walking on oiled hair, and a slip on a steep face doesn't stop. Bluffs hide below slopes that roll over out of sight, so never go down anything you couldn't climb back up, and if you get stuck, stop and call for help rather than gamble. On loose rock, never stand below someone, and shout rock the moment anything moves.

Then the rivers. West Coast rivers come up fast, from rain falling in headwaters you may never see. Between 2007 and 2021, twenty-one people died crossing rivers in New Zealand's outdoors, and six of them were hunters. The rule is short: if in doubt, stay out. Don't cross if the current is faster than walking pace, if the water is murky or carrying debris, if you can hear boulders rolling along the bottom, or if it would come above the thighs of the shortest person in the group. You wait it out on the bank, overnight if that's what it takes. Nobody crosses a flooded river on this trip.

And look after your legs. Up is the work, and down is the damage. Going down, keep your knees soft, your steps small, your weight over your feet, and your poles out in front.

The honest answer8:32

Up here the shot is often possible when the retrieval isn't. A bull on a ledge across a gut is a shot you can make, and an animal you may never reach. So before anyone settles behind the rifle, two questions get asked out loud. Where will it fall? And can we get to it and back safely before dark?

Then run the checks. Is it the right animal, beyond doubt, seen whole through the spotter by the guide as well as you? What's behind it? Is there light and time to reach it, cape it, and be back at the hut by dark? And can you make this shot, now, with your breathing settled, a solid rest, the wind read and the distance known?

Do the sums out loud. Say sunset is eight o'clock. He's an hour's walk away, caping takes an hour, and the hut is two hours from him. That's four hours, so you shoot by four, or you leave him.

If any answer is wrong, the rifle stays quiet. There's always another face, and another day.

That's the mountain, and in the last episode we cover what to do if it goes wrong.

Opening0:00

Help is a long way off on both trips. Whatever happens, the first hour is yours.

This is Lore and Lead. Episode eight. If it goes wrong.

This one covers the order of first aid, bleeding, snakes and ticks, the cold, beacons with no reception, the kea, and getting through two borders. One thing first. Listening to this isn't the same as being trained. Do a first aid course before the trip, and treat this as the reminder.

The order of things0:34

When something goes wrong, the order is always the same, and it has a name you can remember with your heart pounding. D, R, S, A, B, C, D. Danger, response, send for help, airway, breathing, CPR, defibrillation.

Danger first, to you. On a hunt that means rifles first: unload and clear every rifle at the scene. Then loose rock, a snake still close, or fire. One casualty is better than two. Response means a simple command, like open your eyes, squeeze my hand, and a firm grip on the shoulders. Send for help: triple zero in Australia, 111 in New Zealand. With no reception, send someone to the spot with a bar, or set off a beacon. Airway: open the mouth, and if there's anything in it, roll them onto their side to drain it. Breathing: look, listen and feel. Occasional gasps aren't normal breathing.

If they're unresponsive and not breathing normally, start CPR. Put the heel of one hand on the centre of the chest, on the lower half of the breastbone, and the other hand on top. Push down a third of the depth of the chest, a hundred to a hundred and twenty times a minute. Thirty compressions, then two breaths if you're trained and willing. If not, keep pushing, and swap with someone every two minutes. Don't worry about hurting someone who didn't need it. The risk of doing nothing is far greater.

Stop the bleed2:17

Severe bleeding can kill faster than anything else, and it jumps the queue. With life-threatening bleeding, controlling it comes before airway and breathing.

Work down the ladder. Press hard, on or around the wound, with your hand or a pad, and lie them down. That alone stops most bleeding. Raising the limb isn't the fix. If it soaks through, use more pressure, not more pads. A limb that keeps pouring gets a tourniquet, about five centimetres above the bleeding point, not on a joint, and tight enough to stop the bleeding. It hurts, so tell them. Write the time on it, or on their forehead. And once it's on, it stays on until they reach specialist care.

A rifle wound is a bleeding wound first. Make every rifle safe, work the same ladder, call early, and say it's a gunshot wound. Check the other side too, because a bullet that passes through leaves a second wound. And don't pull out anything stuck in a wound. It may be plugging it.

On the weekend, the knife is more likely to hurt you than the rifle. Cut away from yourself, every stroke, and never towards your thigh. Kneeling over an animal, your inner thigh is right under the knife, and the big artery runs down it. And never catch a falling knife. Step back and let it land.

Snakes and ticks3:49

October is spring, and spring is when snakes move. Inland of Tenterfield, the red-bellied black is the one you're most likely to see. Browns are the ones that matter most: across Australia they cause more than half of serious bites. Treat every snakebite as potentially deadly. A bite can be painless, and leave no mark at all.

Keep them completely still. No walking, not even to the ute. The ute comes to them. Call triple zero. Put a broad elastic bandage firmly over the bite, then a second one from the fingers or toes up the whole limb, then splint it. Mark the bite on the bandage, and write down the times. Don't wash it, don't cut it, and don't take the bandage off before hospital. A bite from a big dark spider in this country gets the same treatment, because it could be a funnel-web.

Ticks: freeze them, don't squeeze them. An ether tick spray kills an adult where it is. And here's one to remember for years. A tick bite can make you allergic to red meat, venison and beef included, with reactions usually four to six hours after the meal. If red meat ever makes you sick in the middle of the night, tell a doctor about the ticks.

The cold5:12

Five days after the weekend you're above the bushline, where October nights freeze and the weather is wet. Wet cold is the kind that kills, and it creeps up. People often insist they're fine while they fumble, stumble and make odd decisions. The cold person is usually the last to know, so watch your mates.

Hypothermia means a core temperature below thirty-five degrees. Shivering and clumsy is mild. When the shivering stops and confusion sets in, it's moderate, and that's not a good sign. Get them into shelter, lying flat. Wet clothes off, dry ones on, then wrapped in a sleeping bag with an emergency blanket or plastic around it. Heat packs go on the chest, armpits and back. And if they can swallow, give them sweet food and drink. Sugar, not booze. The sugar fuels the shivering that does the real warming.

Wear wool or synthetics, never cotton, which stops insulating the moment it's wet.

No reception6:18

There's no phone reception at the hut, not a scraped bar. So the party's link to the outside world is a personal locator beacon. It sends a distress signal through satellites to a rescue centre, with your position, and it needs no reception at all. Find out on day one who carries it, and where it lives.

Only set it off in grave and imminent danger, when there's no other way to get help. Antenna up, open sky, switch it on, and stay where you are. The beacon is how they find you. If it goes off by accident in New Zealand, leave it on, and call the Rescue Coordination Centre on 0508 472 269. In Australia it's the opposite: switch it off and call AMSA. Know which country you're in.

If you bring your own beacon, keep it registered with AMSA. Registration is free and no longer expires, and a beacon registered in Australia works in New Zealand. A satellite phone can't call 111, and neither can messaging apps. The police number for satellite phones is in the NZ Directory. Write it inside your pack lid.

People who are rescued in New Zealand aren't expected to pay. What costs lives is waiting too long to ask, because the rescue helicopter can't fly at night or in cloud any more than the one that dropped you off. Before you go, leave your trip plan with someone at home, and tell them you're out of contact from Thursday to Monday. And write in the hut book.

Kea7:54

Kea are the South Island's mountain parrot, and a lot smarter than you'd like. They're nationally endangered, and DOC estimates there are between one and five thousand left.

They're busiest at dawn and dusk, they're drawn to white, yellow and red gear, and they shred anything left out. DOC's list of their exploits includes locking someone in a toilet. So leave nothing out, and feed them nothing. Pack up each morning, and keep soft gear in hard bags. Kea also scavenge carcasses, and lead bullet fragments poison them, so DOC and the Game Animal Council ask hunters in kea country to use lead-free bullets.

Two borders8:38

Two borders, and both are strict about the same thing: dirt, seeds, and anything that's been near an animal.

Going in, fill in the New Zealand Traveller Declaration, online or in the app, from twenty-four hours before you fly. Say yes to boots and outdoor gear. Scrub your boots, gaiters, poles and pack clean of soil and seeds, dry them, and pack them where you can show them. Clean, declared gear goes straight through. An undeclared item is an instant fine of four hundred New Zealand dollars.

Coming home, the Incoming Passenger Card asks whether you've been to farms, wilderness or fresh water in the past thirty days. After this trip, the answer is yes. Tick it, show them your boots, and you'll be through quickly.

Tahr and chamois aren't covered by the endangered species trade treaty, so no special papers are needed for a trophy. It comes home prepared to Australia's biosecurity rules, usually through a taxidermist, and you declare it. Declaring is never a problem. Not declaring is.

That's the library on the road, so read the volumes, do the course, and we'll see you on the tops.