One Heck Of A Ride

146 Chapter 16 Trouble In England ... And A Good Ending In Scotland After Norm Epley and I cleared Customs at the airport in London in September 1989, a young man walked up to us. “Are you here to hunt with Stuart Hulsey?” were the first words out of his mouth. “Yes,” Norm and I replied in unison. “I’ve some bad news for both of you. Stuart asked me to give you the bad news. He’s not going to take you hunting, and he’s made no arrangements for you to hunt anywhere” The youngman’s name was NormanMellows, a used car salesman who knew very little about hunting. Hulsey was nowhere to be found, he said. Funny thing, when Norm first introduced me to Hulsey I told him I didn’t trust the man. Nonetheless, we booked a weeklong hunt with him to see if our little company wanted to book his hunts. Now that my first impression had been proven accurate, neither Norm nor I were ready to turn around and return to California and lose the time and money we’d spent just getting to London. We quickly accepted Norman’s invitation to sit down with him over coffee or tea at his home and talk about our options. After a good bit of discussion, he said he knew someone who had a deer farm and suggested we speak with him. When European Red Deer. Pictured left to right: Norman Mellows, Author and Jim Goodknow we called Jim Good of Southern Deer Services, Good said we could hunt red deer on his estate, but we should not expect big trophies. Norman drove us to Good’s farm, and even went out hunting with us. After I shot a small European red stag and a fox, Jim called Bill and Steve Appleby, the father and son who managed the hunting at the world-famous Woburn Estate, to set up a muntjac and Chinese water deer hunt for us. We hunted “safari style,” by driving around the estate until we found our game. Norm took a good Chinese water deer and a Reeves muntjac, Author took a red fox and a small European red deer taken while hunting on Jim Goodknow’s Southern Deer Services farm with Jim Goodknow and Norman Mellows. and I took a great Chinese water deer, so all was not lost when Hulsey abandoned us. (Water deer are a primitive Asian deer that have fangs instead of antlers. These interesting little deer were brought from China and Korea to England’s zoos beginning in the late 1800s and enough escaped over the next forty to fifty years that it is said that Britain has more than 10% of all the water deer in the world. Only mature males have visible tusks, and we passed up several deer before Norm shot his buck inside the estate. I shot mine the next day. My water deer weighed only about thirty pounds, but its long teeth made it a gold-medal animal. Most deer are not as vocal