23

Rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ types and other hunters and gatherers

There was room for all types in the Kiwi scheme of things as it related to life on the land. Big softies, hard cases and good blokes represented just one subset – or maybe three. Rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ types were another, although they tended to surface at the opposite end of the spectrum. Even then, they represented only a fraction of the larger subset with a mind to go hunting.

The term rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ is vague in origin. It conjures up a macho, harum-scarum scenario redolent of the Wild West. Not so much the wild west of New Zealand, centred on Greymouth, Hokitika and Westport, but the cowboy precincts of North America, like Dodge City, named for the citizens who had to dodge as the bullets flew.

The shootin’ part of the expression made sense. It was generally associated with hunting, a significant preoccupation of farmers and others on the land.

Tootin’ is more problematic. Cue the old steam-hauled trains of the Wild West, engines outrunning injuns and generally tootin’ up a storm. The toot was the sound of the steam engine’s whistle as it competed with the call of the coyote.

The part played by steam trains in New Zealand, in terms of hunting, was harder to gauge. Certainly there were tales of wild cattle being shot from the train in the early days at Cass, with hunters taking advantage of the speed and vantage point. Both shootin’ and tootin’ featured, with the engine driver sounding his whistle to alert the hunters when quarry was sighted up around the bend.

A railway theme continued in the days when plagues of rabbits nibbled away at those parts of the South Island serviced by rail. The Central Otago line was particularly well-placed to provide rabbit hunters with access to areas poorly served by roads. Conventional trains saw tootin’ and shootin’, but there was little tootin’ where hunters used railway jiggers to access the hinterland and take pot shots at the rabbits. Just a lot of shootin’.

That leaves rootin’, which may or may not be self-explanatory. Suffice to say that shootin’, tootin’ types didn’t take prisoners when the time came to cool their heels, head for town and seek out female companionship. And of course such mischievous hombres posed the possibility of rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ types being able to do all three things at once. The macho trifecta. Male multitasking. Perhaps, if you were an engine driver with one hand pulling the whistle cord, the other cradling a shotgun – and the rest left to the imagination.

New Zealand’s rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ heritage is best exemplified by hunters who are inclined to take their guns to town – and country – and are quick on the draw. Many are deadeye dicks, or simply dicks, as one critic had it. And if they can’t shoot the toot, they’ll talk the talk. Hunting tales and exaggeration are often as fishy as fishing stories.

Angus was for real though. He was a deadeye dick, a really good shot, although some regarded him as a deadeye drunk. It was true that Angus liked his drop, yet claims he made regarding being a better shot with a shot of something under his belt brought scant comfort to friends, who were admittedly on the wowserish side. When visiting extended family, Angus could always be relied upon to bag a pheasant or wild turkey and present it to the ladies in the kitchen for the evening meal. When a couple of chooks required dispatching for Christmas dinner, Angus could take out both birds with a single shot. His coup de grace though was his ability to pick pears off the tree with a .22 by hitting the stalks and seeing the fruit fall into the long grass with scarcely a bruise.

Angus was upstaged, however, by the hunting exploits of a former archery champion who once shot two pigs in the bush with the same arrow. Pig number one was run through and then the second was speared to a tree as the arrow completed its course. If the story was true, two pigs with one arrow appeals as being further up the food-hunting chain than picking pears with a .22. Either way, there was a touch of the William Tells in both exploits. Luckily neither Angus nor the archer ever tried halving an apple sitting on anyone’s head.

Some hunters and gatherers are obviously larger than life. Don Foster was just large. If there were any holes in the streambed on his Te Muka property, where Don often fossicked for eels, his weighty frame would seek them out. There was a hole – a deep one – and Don went down. He disappeared completely from sight one day and the only evidence was a bit of a Brylcreem slick and a circling trilby. It took Don’s eeling companions some time to extricate him from the muddy pug and manhandle his 18 stone to the bank. Don could have lost his life, but he was more concerned about the lost trilby gathering pace on its way to the Pacific.

Obviously the hunter-gatherer environment can be treacherous, but we are inclined to elevate that risk by displaying a lack of caution and an unwillingness to appreciate the wisdom bequeathed by experience.

Some young bucks with a mind to go hunting wouldn’t listen to sage old-timers like Bill. Together with Jason, a bit of a yearling, Bill was holed up in a shearers’ hut near Molesworth as the winter of 1981, a bitter, spiteful season, dumped perishing snow on the ground. The wind whistled off the Buggeries like a bugger. Rain turned to horizontal sleet. On a day like this Bill and Jason knew why hunters called the Black Birch Range the Buggeries, and why nearby Mount Horrible was indeed horrible.

Inside the hut things were toasty enough. The fire roared, throwing out a heat that kept the extremities defrosted. Bill snuggled up in his greatcoat and the odd snort of Black Label helped him relax. Not Jason though.

‘The weather’s easing Bill,’ Jason yelled above the ungodly howling of wind and sleet. If anything, the day turned darker.

‘We’re not going hunting in that, son,’ Bill assured as he edged closer to the fire. ‘No self-respecting prey will be out there anyway.’

‘It’s definitely clearing Bill. You can just about see the Buggeries. And look Bill, look at that. You can see a stag’s antlers behind that outcrop.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘It’s true, the antlers are moving. It’s a stag.’

‘That’ll be branches moving in the wind, son.’

Two things conspired to make Bill reconsider his mate’s request. The Black Label had run out and the wind was dropping. Three things, really. You should never dampen youthful enthusiasm. It would be a shame to deny the nipper.

‘Come on Bill, take a look, it’s a bloody stag’s antlers.’

‘You’re bloody hallucinating. Hypothermia probably, I’ll be bound and buggered.’

But Bill did take a look as the wind dropped further. If they were branches they were doing a tolerable impersonation of a stag’s antlers. And how come they were still moving when the wind had now dropped away altogether?

The two hunters saddled up, although Bill was still wary of the treacherous, iced-up terrain. They coaxed the unwilling horses in the direction of the outcrop behind which the antlers had been detected. As they eased the nags along a narrow ledge, Bill’s horse lost its footing on an icy stretch and crashed sideways. Bill was lucky enough to be thrown clear but he landed heavily, flat on his back. Jason dismounted and rushed to his side.

‘Back’s buggered,’ Bill announced through gritted teeth. Jason, despite the youthful enthusiasm that had got them into this precarious situation in the first place, remembered the drill.

‘Never move a man with a back injury.’ All very well if you’ve come a cropper on a pleasant summer Sunday afternoon in the park amidst people, one of whom would probably be a doctor. If you’re in a big enough crowd, there might just be a back doctor in the house. Such wild conjecture whistled around Jason’s brain like the northerly that had earlier funnelled through the outcrops.

‘Never move a man with a buggered back, be buggered.’ Jason was already talking to himself, a troubling sign. If he didn’t move Bill he’d have more than a buggered back. Bill would be terminally buggered. Seriously killed by the elements.

The bit between getting Bill off the mountain and arranging for his admission to the local hospital remained a blur to Jason. Suffice it to say that the horses got the bit between their teeth as they stepped sure-footedly through extreme circumstances.

Bill was admitted with all due speed and decorum. Jason was invited to thaw out in front of a roaring fire in the visitors’ room. He wondered if Bill had ruptured a disc, punctured a vertebra or two, twisted a spinal cord – or two. Doctors ran tests and called for X-rays from as many angles as funding would allow.

‘How’s it going?’ Jason asked Bill as he was trolleyed down the corridor.

‘Back’s buggered,’ was the husky reply.

Jason wished he could get trolleyed too. It would ease the guilt.

Eventually Bill was wheeled back into the recovery room. A cultured-looking specialist, wearing his stethoscope like a fashion statement and spouting big words and complex medical terms to nursing minions, confronted Jason.

‘Are you the next of kin?’

‘No, I brought him in.’

‘You’d better sit down.’ The specialist motioned towards a chair.

‘I’d prefer to stand.’

‘Well, stand in the chair then.’

The cultured-looking specialist stroked his goatee, averted his gaze to the snow-flecked Buggeries, rubbed his nose, rose to his full height...

‘What’s the verdict, Doc?’ Jason pleaded.

‘His back’s buggered.’

It was a chilling diagnosis. Jason cursed his passion for hunting, but not out loud. The matron came through, fluffing up pillows and generally advising Jason to stand well clear. The fact he was now sitting in a chair some metres from the point of diagnosis and pillow fluffing went unnoticed.

‘Will he be alright, matron?’

‘Back’s buggered.’

A nurse with long needles and nostril hair searched for entry points in Bill’s arm.

‘Will he be all right, nurse?’

‘Back’s buggered.’

X-ray photos were held up to the light by an intern. Out the window the Buggeries were wreathed in snow. Jason peeked over the intern’s shoulder. Bill’s back looked like an aerial photograph of the Raurimu Spiral on the North Island Main Trunk.

‘Not so good, eh Doc?’

‘Indeed no. Back’s buggered.’

Bill’s wife, having been alerted, visited. The matron returned, ready to fluff up that which needed fluffing.

‘How is he matron?’ asked the wife.

‘His back is in fact buggered, dear.’

A box of tissues was provided.

‘You should never move a man with a suspected back injury,’ matron ventured.

What she didn’t venture was the notion that if Bill had not been moved he would now be as dead as a doornail, as non-living as a neutered newt.

Bill bounced back from the buggered back, Jason received a citation for bravery and Bill’s horse didn’t have a mark on him. Bill wasn’t the only hunter to come a cropper.

‘Knee’s buggered’ would have been the diagnosis the time Cliff went hunting in the wilds of the eastern Bay of Plenty, in that rugged, isolated stretch near the headwaters of the Whakatane River.

Cliff bagged a stag, then, while carrying it out, slipped down the river bank and dislocated his knee. The pain can only be imagined by those who weren’t there. Cliff kept his cool. In fact he rolled into the icy waters of the Whakatane, an act that limited the swelling, before manhandling the knee back into position. The cry of pain echoed in the canyon and sent squadrons of mallards into the sky.

After dragging himself up the bank, Cliff fashioned splints out of manuka and then, with the help of his young son, he was able to drag the deer carcass – and his own – out of the bush to his vehicle. Prompted by his father’s instructions, the son was able to activate the accelerator. Cliff’s left leg wouldn’t work. His right leg had jurisdiction over the other pedals and although half blinded by pain, he was able to steer his vehicle to the local hospital.

His left leg was placed in a plaster cast and Cliff was sent home to rest up. No one considered it necessary to remind him to lay off the hunting until the injury was healed. Until the kneecap had found its way home to the knee socket. And anyway the foot-to-thigh cast would make manoeuvring in the bush well nigh impossible. Consequently there was some consternation when Cliff returned to the hospital some time later for a check-up. The lower reaches of the cast appeared to have dissolved, as if it had been dunked in water. Which it had. You can’t avoid getting wet while wading up the Whakatane in pursuit of prey.

Cliff was a dedicated, determined hunter – with a well-developed sense of fair play. Once he was shadowing a deer on the far side of the river from his motor bike. Cliff fired a shot and the deer went down, a bullet in its neck. Meanwhile, another hunter had been pursuing the same deer from behind, up the other bank. When it fell he claimed it as his own. Cliff pointed out the neck wound, which could not have been inflicted from the rear. The other hunter was unable to verify his rights to the prize as there were no bullet holes in the deer’s rear. Cliff could have argued the point until the godwits returned from Alaska, but preferred the option of splitting the spoils and cutting the deer in two.

As much as hunting animals was a passion, it was Cliff’s hunting of inanimate objects – the ubiquitous, flightless Land Rover motor vehicle in particular – that played a big part in his waking hours. And at night, in dreams, he saw the realisation of one of those dreams – the creation of a Land Rover museum where restored workhorses and abandoned dungers would go on display.

The thrill of the chase, as with most hunting, was as adrenaline-charged as securing the quarry. Cliff scoured the country­side seeking out unwanted Land Rovers. They were indeed ubiquitous and Cliff travelled many a mile tracking them down. Sightings of the Land Rover had been made on Great Barrier Island, the Chathams, Cape Palliser, East Cape, up north and down south. In city and suburb, big and small towns, but more likely in some of the most remote pockets of the North Island, down roads that weren’t even on conventional maps. Some of them weren’t even roads, just four-wheel-drive tracks through bush, bracken, broom and swamp. Such backwaters were indeed watery. Streams were forded, flooded wetlands negotiated.

Hunting Land Rovers was more emotionally challenging than chasing down deer or pig, for there was invariably the human element to confront. Old Land Rovers often had old owners. They’d formed a powerful attachment to their vehicles but realised they could no longer care for them. It wasn’t about the money either. Some owners refused to accept payment. They just wanted their Land Rovers to go to a good home where they could live out their days in dignity. Cliff certainly provided that as he promised to set about restoring them to their former glory.

One old Maori guy cried as he said goodbye to his Land Rover. Wistful backward glances were common as the old rust buckets disappeared over the horizon. After all, the faithful craft had served a special purpose for many. One had provided living quarters for a down-at-heel owner, another, uplifted from Castlepoint Beach on the Wairarapa Coast, had served time as a fire engine. On the East Coast a family had utilised their Land Rover to gather shellfish at low tide. Then there was the time that Cliff’s hunting instincts flushed out a Land Rover that was doing duty as a chook run. Such a find produced a double bounty: the vehicle itself and a shitload of chook manure that Cliff’s wife was able to put to good use on her ample vege patch.

Cliff’s honourable hunting exploits, involving both animate and inanimate quarry, were a country mile from the activities of traditional rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ types. At the extreme end of the spectrum are reports of lunatics hunting a variety of prey. Not long after World War II, aerial top-dressing became an integral part of pasture development in New Zealand. Squadrons of Tiger Moths and the like buzzed once denuded farmlands. One farmer, still rather disorientated by his war experiences, tried to shoot down a low-flying top-dresser that he thought was a Luftwaffe stray. Luckily he was unable to boast of ‘bagging a Tiger Moth’ for his trophy cabinet, but it was a near thing.