One Heck Of A Ride

199 The South Pacific silhouetted in the moonlight and could see it was a wild boar, I unzipped my sleeping bag, slowly reached for the rifle, and shot the boar without getting up. “What was that?” Chris said rather loudly when the shot suddenly woke him. “We had a visitor. Awild boar,” I said. “A big Author with a good Wild Boar shot in the moonlight from his sleeping bag one, I think.” And that’s what it was. With our flashlights, I could see that it was much larger than the feral hogs I’ve shot in California. After leaving Chris, I hooked up with a guide named Mervin Tracy Jackson (also recommended by a taxidermist) and drove south down the coast to two stations in Queensland, where I shot feral goats near Townsville and Torrance Creek. Trouble In Tasmania With three days with nothing to do before I was scheduled to arrive in New Zealand, I flew to Tasmania before leaving Australia, just to see it. Talk about a small world, when I checked into a hotel in the provincial capital of Hobart I learned the married couple who managed it were from Santa Maria, about twenty miles from our home in Lompoc. Their hotel on the east side of the island was mere inches above the high tide mark, and the sea was so calm it was like a lake. I rented a car the next morning and drove around the mountainous island, visiting with friendly people along the way. One of them was a guy in a pawnshop who was a carpet layer, and I enjoyed talking shop with him. When I returned to Hobart’s airport to begin my journey to New Zealand, I noticed that a man was watching me push the cart with my bags and bundle of rusa deer antlers and bows and arrows. After a while, a second man showed up and I noticed both were wearing uniforms with badges indicating they were wildlife agents. When they showed me their credentials and asked me to accompany them to a back room where we could talk about my antlers, I said I’d shot the deer in Papua New Guinea and showed them Brian’s letter. It was then that they said I’d broken the law because I didn’t have Australian permits to import or export them. It cost me $1,000.00 to have the antlers put in bond until they eventually were shipped to a taxidermist in Christchurch for shipping to California. Two months after returning to Lompoc, I received a letter from the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service stating that, although I could have been fined $2,000.00 if found guilty of violating the province’s wildlife laws, my case file was officially closed. Tasmania the shop owner is showing an antique carpet Knee Kicker tools of my trade