Bog Myrtle & Peat

Six weeks ago, I missed a chance at a nice buck on the back of the hill. The fog was swirling around me when I spotted him, striding  through the heather. I tried an ambush, but it was hopeless. I left the hill that morning buzzing with ideas for how to outwit him, but it turns out that he wasn’t destined to be my first big buck.

Taking my friend Richard with me to deal with some jackdaw nests around the shepherd’s house, I suggested that it might be worth his while bringing a rifle. It was a beautiful evening last night, with scarcely a cloud in the sky. We had bumped off two nests and shot six adult birds within half an hour, and as the sun slid lower and lower, we decided to take a walk arond the back of the hill. I don’t have the money for .243 bullets at the moment, but Richard is setting up a business hand loading bullets for extreme accuracy and never has a shortage of ammunition for his 25-06.

We took a circuit north, then turned into the sun over a mile and a half of rough bog. The hills of Dumfriesshire were turning faintly purple to the north as we lay down on a low rise with a clear view of over 1,000 yards in every direction. Richard’s rifle is set up to shoot over 500 yards, and we swung our binoculars across the fading bog hoping for at least a fox. Within five minutes, we had spotted something even better.

My big buck hopped out of the trees and trotted towards us. He was nine hundred yards away. Richard slid off the rise and backed away. Without my own rifle, I was only a hinderance to the stalk so I made do instead with watching proceedings unravel from my heathery vantage point.

Scrambling down a flooded ditch, Richard crawled along the back of the dyke towards the distant speck. Watching through the binoculars, I could see the buck grazing and trotting towards him. It frolicked and kicked its heels through a patch of dead rushes and still Richard closed on him, keeping low behind the wall and covering the ground silently. When he stopped moving and lay down, I focused all my attention on the buck, waiting for the shot. My binoculars were shaking with excitement.

The buck sat down sharply, then stood up and walked a few paces forward as if suddenly confused. It fell forwards, then stood up, then fell again. A second later, I heard the shot. Richard had placed his bullet a little far back, but at 315 yards, it was the longest deer he had ever shot. I stood up and flushed a grouse cock who had been lying just feet away from me all the time. Stars were starting to show in the east and I was thrilled beyond belief. I have never been so excited by watching someone do something without actually doing it myself.

Foolishly, we were unprepared. Two miles away from the car, we gralloched the buck before we realised that we had no way of getting him off the hill other than old fashioned brute strength. It took an hour and a half to cross the snipe bog with the increasingly heavy body thumping on our legs. Birds rustled through the heather all around and three snipe drummed overhead. With a dusty moon standing high in the darkness, I was as close to heaven as I could be.