FEATURE Peter Roefs

After mainly shooting rabbits and foxes, I was then able to take part in the feral goat eradication program in the Gammon Ranges in the early nineties.

Not long after that, I was invited to join a deer hunting crew, but on the way home from the second trip to the High Country, I had a car accident, which left me quadriplegic. So, I never got to score a deer.

Fast forward lots of years, and I was still dreaming of shooting a deer one day. After closing a busy chapter of my life, I had a lot of spare time to think of my next project. How could we make my dream come true?

In the beginning, we made some brackets on my manual wheelchair, and I practised with my .22 rimfire on rabbits. I had a solenoid on the trigger and a battery so that I could squeeze a switch between my teeth to set the rifle off, but it did not work consistently, and that was frustrating. Also, getting on the grass with the manual wheelchair was too hard.

I needed to be able to go bush, which meant a four-wheel drive electric wheelchair. Fortunately, my insurance company was willing to supply me with one, and now I could go where I had not been able to go for a long, long time. For me, this was a new-found freedom. You don’t know what you are missing until it is gone. It is so true.

This electric wheelchair can go to more places than I am brave enough to take it, so going in paddocks and on the beach is no problem. It is also fully adjustable: seat up and down, tilt forwards and back, feet up and down, and it can even lay the seat flat.

Now, we had to make a sturdy gun bracket to sit on the wheelchair. To keep it simple, we used parts that were lying around: a piece of 40 x 40mm steel pipe, which we bent to the right shape and fitted a camera tripod swivel head to, and another pipe with the rifle brackets on it, and that was it.

The rifle stand bolts onto the footrest bracket, and now the gun can swivel up and down and left and right. And because the chair is adjustable, I can set the gun firmly to my shoulder, and it is as steady as if I am shooting from a bench. I no longer need to use the solenoid to pull the trigger, and the gun stand absorbs most of the recoil.

For my sixtieth birthday, which fell in the middle of the Covid lock-down, I rewarded myself with a new Tikka T3x in .308 calibre with a Vortex Diamondback ’scope in 4-16 x 44 because if I were to shoot a deer, it would probably be from a fair distance.

A mate had to do a job on a 100-acre property in the middle of the state forest, and he asked the owner for permission to hunt deer. The owner agreed, and my mate asked me to join him. This was my opportunity to get up close to deer finally.

The property is mainly bush with cleared areas, two of which showed promise. There were plenty of deer signs, including footprints and droppings. We went there several times and sat in a hide until dark but did not see deer. Other people who also had access to the property had taken a couple of deer, so I knew it would happen one day.

Then Father’s Day came up, and my daughter asked me what I wanted as a present. I asked if she could take me hunting, and she agreed. The day we went out, there was a strong wind blowing from the east as we set the hide up in the corner of one of the clearings. I had my scope on 12-power as I was expecting a long shot. My rifle is zeroed at 200m because I never expected to get too close to a deer in my wheelchair.

We waited until it was almost dark, but nothing happened. I asked my daughter to pack up while I would go along the track and look around the corner. By this time, it was almost dark, and when I came around the bend in the track, I saw a brown shape only 30m away with its backside towards me. I looked through the scope but could only see brown.

Important lessons learned! Expect the unexpected and put the ’scope on low-power. When a deer is far away, there is plenty of time to up the magnification, but when it is close, there is no time to make a change.

Turning the corner, the wind was now behind me, and the deer got a good nose full of my scent. It was too dark to see the ’scope’s crosshairs, and the deer took off to the edge of the bush. I could not see it any more, so I decided to move and then got honked at.

Instead of being disappointed, I had a very satisfying feeling that I got so close without taking a shot. My daughter heard the honk as well, and when I got back to her, she was just as excited as me, so we decided to return the following week.

The day we went back to the property, the weather was perfect; there was hardly any wind, the temperature was nice, and it was just lovely to be out there. The breeze was coming from the south, so we decided to start from the back of the property and make our way to the front. Near one of the entrances to a paddock is a huge fallen tree with a bracken around it, so we decided to sit there for a while.

It was just after 5.30pm. We had only been there 20 minutes when I spotted a deer on the edge of the bush and top of a rise, happily feeding away. I lined up the crosshairs on the top of her shoulder blade, and the Tikka 308 echoed.

At 170m, the 150-grain projectile did its job, and she dropped where she stood. Finally, my dream came true after 29 years.

Not everyone agrees on my shot placement, but the risk of her running 50 to 100m from a heart shot meant I could lose her in the dense bush where I am unable to go. The place where she lay was very steep, so my daughter dragged her down a fair way to take photos. We then roped a leg to the wheelchair and dragged her to the van.

My daughter gutted her under my instructions in the lights of my wheelchair. She did a good job for the first time ever. I am so proud of her. We wanted to use all the meat, so we took the carcase home.

As it was a cold night, we hung the carcase in the fernery at my place, pulling it up with the help of the wheelchair. When my wife came home at 10pm and saw the blood trail on the driveway, she decided to hose it down before the blood dried. The neighbours must have thought that she was getting rid of evidence from a crime scene, scrubbing the driveway late at night.

The next day, we had the carcase cut up, some minced, some for roasts and some for casseroles and pies. We will be eating good for quite a while.

So, there it is; after all those years, my dream came true. For anyone out there, if I can do it, so can you. Where a will is a way, don’t give up on your dreams!