Of course, the first job to do when you get to your destination is to check that rifles haven’t taken a knock & been knocked out of zero – yes it does happen no matter how careful you are or indeed no matter how secure your rifle case is

With that task out of the way, the next thing in the normal course of events would have been to get up the hill in this (which will go just about anywhere, or not as we were to find out) …

…but there were four of us, shooting in pairs on alternate days & as the sun was shining, inevitably, it was our day off. Needless to say, in that particular part of the world, the good weather didn’t hold & the next day, it was simply bucketing down. However, there is absolutely no point in going stalking in Scotland in November if you aren’t prepared to get at least a little damp – so undaunted we piled into the stalkers landie & headed up the hill. In fact we probably hadn’t been climbing for more than ten minutes when we saw a group of twenty or so hinds in the valley below. Chuckmeister & the ghillie piled out into the pouring rain & before I knew it, Chuck had cleanly killed his first ever deer - on the other side of the river, which was going to cause us a small issue about an hour later.

Anyway, we headed off up the track once more & about fifteen minutes later, YHC took another hind & her calf at an angle of about sixty degrees upwards, about one hundred seventy yards away. Having recovered the carcasses we went back to pick up our first beast.

Now getting the vehicle over the river in question proved to be slightly lively but doable, crossing back over again was slightly more fraught, the rain having turned the banks to a complete bog & washed away the ford we were trying to use