One Heck Of A Ride

147 Trouble In England as water deer, either. In addition to barking when alarmed, whenever we spooked one it ran off whistling and leaping like a rabbit.) Although this hunt began with us being met at the airport by a used car salesman who knew nothing about hunting, Norman saved the day for us on that trip. I never learned why he would bother to greet two Americans he had never met with news that their outfitter had abandoned them, but I suspect Stuart Hulsey paid him to do it. Hulsey probably expected us to turn around and return to the States, but Norm and I were more persistent than that. We’d travelled to England to hunt, and weren’t about to fold up our tent and return home. Not long after Norm and I returned to California, Kevin Downer, who originally had guided for Hulsey, started his top-notch guiding service. I also did some digging to learn more about Hulsey and found we were not the only hunters with similar complaints, and some of those complaints were from high-profile people in the international hunting community. When I submitted a report to The Hunting Report newsletter, publisher Don Causey said he needed written proof of Hulsey’s alleged failure to perform for eight to ten other hunters before he would publish my negative report. Chinese water deer have “fangs” instead of antlers. Author took this gold-medal male at Woburn Estate with Bill and Steve Appleby, the father and son who managed hunting on the estate So I called and wrote the people I’d heard were complaining about Hulsey, and wound up with eleven letters from hunters and their wives who said the guy had failed to show up to take them hunting and shopping as promised. The Hunting Report eventually published a warning about Stuart Hulsey, which led to Safari Club International banning him and prohibiting him from exhibiting at its conventions. Red Stags In The Scottish Highlands What follows is from the SCI Record Book: “A true highlands deer hunt can be a memorable experience that is steeped in tradition. One is guided by a stalker who spots game with a pullout telescope (spy glass). Until recently, a pony would go along to carry back any deer, but these days, sadly, the pony is usually replaced by an all- terrain vehicle. Rain gear is a must and should be of the highest quality. One should be fit, for there is considerable hiking up and more up-walking, and the stalks often consist of long, muddy crawls across the treeless moors to point-blank range (stalkers have a poor opinion of clients’ marksmanship).” After Norman Mellows helped us salvage the first leg of our 1999 trip to the United Kingdom, Norm Epley and I flew to the historic city of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands for an exploratory hunt to see if we would recommend the hunt and the outfitter to the clients of our fledgling booking agency. We were greeted at the airport by our “stalker” (guide), David Jackson, and driven about thirty miles to Glenurguhart Lodge in a forested area not far from Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle. We each planned to hunt Scottish red stag (the smallest of the red deer subspecies). Unlike the red deer I’d hunted in Spain and Poland, the Scottish variety lives in wide-open, nearly treeless terrain at the base of the Highlands, and our stalker made every effort to get us within comfortable shooting