One Heck Of A Ride

196 The South Pacific The lodge had a large flat-bottom aluminum boat with a 50 hp outboard motor, and Sam drove us to the Tonda Wildlife Reserve and Management Area the first morning of my hunt. The Bensbach River was loaded with ducks and geese (and salt-water crocodiles) everywhere. Its banks were mostly steep and higher than our boat, and I didn’t get to see much of the land above it until Sam parked the boat about an hour from the lodge and we began walking. Three hours later, I thought I had entered someone’s garden. There were hundreds of deer and a few wallabies in every direction I looked across the flat floodplain. Estimates have placed the number of rusa deer in the reserve at 50,000. It seemed as if I were seeing all of them all at once from where I was standing. With so many deer in view, I was very selective. One of the stags had grass hanging from his antlers, which led me to name him “Old Haystack.” After I shot him offhand at 115 yards, I learned the main beams of his antlers were 29 ½ inches long, a good start for my first day. Before returning to the lodge, I shot another rusa stag and used Brian’s Russian-made 12-gauge single-shot shotgun to shoot a few black ducks. In the three days I hunted deer, I shot seven stags and a wild boar. Every stag was a good one, two had exceptional antlers, and one was gold- Author with one of the many Rusa Deer taken on the trip to Papua, New Guinea medal class. Sam helped me skin and remove their antlers and skull plates. Brian said most of the meat would be salted, dried, and exported for sale as “Bensbach jerky,” but some was given to Sam’s family and friends. I also was served venison in Author crossing one of many water ways with a good set of Rusa Deer antlers around his neck. Rusa Deer on the flood planes in Papua, New Guinea the lodge. Brian said rusa deer were not indigenous to Papua New Guinea. The Dutch had introduced them in 1913 and 1920 to their territory in the western half of the island of New Guinea near the Papua New Guinea border. These deer spread eastward to the Bensbach and Morehead river floodplains. There was some controversy early on over whether these were the Javan or Moluccan subspecies, but the SCI record books now list