Small Game Hunting and Fine Food

When my brother and I were kids on the Otewa farm, out the back of Otorohanga, our father bought us a little Gecado 15 slug-gun.

It was .177 calibre, smooth-bored, broke open in the middle, and had a non-adjustable rear V sight and a bead foresight.

Accuracy – after considerable practice – was good to about 30 metres, and, I am ashamed to say it now, anything that moved and wasn’t one of Mum’s chooks or Dad’s farm animals was fair game.

Birds especially took a hammering, but so too did the rats that lived under fenceline logs around the piggery enclosures.

We got very smart at putting little trails of curds out from the rat-holes under the logs, to entice them out to a bigger heap of curds … and a clean-shot kill.  It worked, time and again, and we thinned out the rodent population considerably for several years with that little gun.

Mynahs were another favourite target, raucous, bullying, cunning sods that they were, always scaring the smaller birds away and scoffing the curds for themselves. 

My best day was seven, hiding by squatting with the complete unconcern of a pre-teen boy in a pigsty inhabited by an aged sow and her litter of piglets. The sow could easily have savaged me as a perceived threat to her young, but there appeared to be a mutual understanding that neither would harm the other, and the birds and rats could never figure out where I was.

Rabbits, of course, were the “big game” species we both tried hard to claim, and gradually we honed our skills on how to hunt to within 20 metres or so for the rather weak pellet to be effective. It had to be a head-shot to make sure of nailing the bunny even at that range.

But it taught us both the need for accuracy, careful stalking, patience, sitting still, and taking only those shots we knew would be effective.

We always brought such trophies home, and Mum invariably used them as part of the table fare. She was glad to have them, although she always required us to skin and clean them first.

Now, some decades on and with several rather more sophisticated firearms to choose from, rabbit-hunting is still one of my favourite pastimes. My little second-hand five-shot Brno bolt-action .22 rifle is more than 50 years old, but still works beautifully smoothly, and is extraordinarily accurate out to and beyond 100 metres. With it I’ve shot hundreds of rabbits, hares and possums.

I also have a lovely Anschutz deluxe four-shot bolt-action .22 Magnum I bought brand-new in Hamilton for £19-17-6d ($39.75) about 1962, and that too has shot hundreds more rabbits, hares, possums and goats in its just-gone half-century of living at my place.

An absolutely perfect day for me is to take one or other of these little rifles and a handful of cartridges, a small day pack with water, an apple and a few snack-bars, and wander off into the hills of a friend’s big farm for some hours.

Just mooching along quietly, it’s astounding and delightful what wildlife one sees on such a ramble, especially when I find a favourite vantage point, sit down with my back against a post and keep still.

It takes about 10 minutes before little beasties start to move – almost invariably they will have seen me before I saw them, in which case they sink quietly out of sight and freeze.

Birds begin to sing again, insects start buzzing or yodelling, and the small animals once again feel safe to go about their business – rabbits doing what rabbits often do, or taking another bite to eat; hares sitting up and scratching behind their long brown ears; rats and mice racing stop-start along branches or a fence-line; stoats or the rarer little weasels rushing abruptly along scent trails; big, hammer-headed wildcats stalking and slinking along on the edge of bush patches or hedges, always looking menacing and with flat eyes that can detect the slightest movement on my part.

See, rabbit shooting is not just about shooting rabbits, any more than deer stalking is just about hunting deer.

It’s also about appreciating that there are lots of other things out there to take notice of; and that sometimes some of them need to be taken out so that other, more useful species can survive more widely.

Whacking a big bush-rat, a stoat or wildcat is a major plus in my book – all three are consummate destroyers of wildlife, both native and introduced, and often they kill far more than they can ever eat.

So I have no compunction in taking out such predators, even though I’m sure I’ll be viewed by some as one myself.

As well, rabbits and hares are fair game. Both are superb eating. My mother taught me how to cook rabbits, either wrapped in bacon and baked, or dissected and casseroled in a rich sauce that included coarse-cut onion, carrot, potato and kumara.  Prunes and several dried apricots were added, and the flavour was to die for. She also made delicious rabbit brawns, regrettably a skill she never passed on.

Recently a farmer friend and his family came to barbecue-dinner and he brought with him half a dozen back-straps stripped from three big hares shot a couple of days previously.

Each back-strap was about 4cm wide, 3cm thick and 15cm long – rich, dark meat that had been marinated for 24 hours.

We cut them into medallions and cook them hot and fast. They were like bites of melt-in-the-mouth magic.

The little .22 Magnum rifle is good for shots out to 200m, if I can hold it steady enough, while the Brno regularly rolls rabbits out to 125m, though I wouldn’t use it on a wildcat at more than 50m. They are very tough cookies, those cats, much tougher than the average domestic moggie.

Stoats, weasels or ferrets I’ll take my chances with at any range. The more of them I can get the better, in my book.

Be that as it may, rabbit shooting has a lot to commend it – good exercise, good solitude, and ultimately good eating.   

Kingsley is a columnist with the Waikato Times in Hamilton. His Outdoors columns appear fortnightly, and he has recently published his illustrated second book of selected columns. He is now working on his third, which is due out early next year. He can be contacted at kingsley(at)accuwrite.co.nz

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