One Heck Of A Ride

204 The South Pacific could approach was two hundred yards. There was a slight breeze and not much to use for a rest, but I made the shot and had another beautiful trophy. I wanted to shoot a wallaroo (a long-tailed marsupial midway in size between a standard kangaroo and a wallaby) and Mike wanted to visit his family, so we left Marty with Shane and Michelle and another couple while Mike and I drove to their farm. The place was infested with possums, and not the type we have in North America. New Zealand’s fur-covered, bushy- tailed squirrel-like versions were introduced from Australia in 1837 to create a fur industry. Instead, with no predators to control them, they rapidly became a serious threat to the island nation’s environment by eating native birds and their eggs, and amazing quantities of unique native plants, ferns, snails, fungi and invertebrates. Dairy and deer farmers hate them because they are bovine Author and a good Fallow Deer tuberculosis carriers, and some say they are threatening the kea (a mountain parrot) by eating their chicks. Despite the government’s all-out attempts to exterminate them with poison, traps and guns they are thriving. I tried to do my part, but quit after shooting seventy of them the first night. After collecting a wallaroo the next day, Mike asked what I wanted to do next. When I said I wanted to bungee jump, he said he didn’t think any visiting hunter had tried it. He had taken his clients to watch others jump, but none had done the deed. This only made me more determined to be the first. There was a young couple in their mid- twenties in line before me, and the girl balked when it was her turn. It took at least twentyminutes for her boyfriend and the guys handling the jump to coax her off the plank, but the guy bailed right off. Meanwhile, I had been standing there all the while with my legs bound and cushioned and ready to jump. When it was my turn, I hopped to the plank, someone attached my legs to a bungee, and I hopped off. What a rush! I bounced three or four times above the river before guys in a boat unhooked me. After I climbed out of the canyon, Mike kept repeating that I’d done something no other American hunter had done. Maybe so. I bought a videotape advertising the river’s Author trying out the New Zeland Bungee jumping