The Hunter's Gift

The morning began with a reminder that the mountains, even on their gentler days, do not let you forget where you are. The first stretch from Waiau Forks led us across rock landslides, fields of tumbled stone where the mountainside had at some point surrendered to gravity and deposited itself across the valley floor. We picked our way through carefully, stepping from boulder to boulder, reading the terrain for stability before committing weight, packs swaying with each uneven step. It was slow, deliberate work, the kind of hiking that occupies the entire mind and leaves no room for daydreaming or audiobooks.

But then the rocks released us, and the valley opened up.

The landscape transformed as though someone had turned a page. The tumbled stone gave way to broad, rolling grasslands that swept across the valley floor in waves of green and gold, the tussock rippling in the breeze like the surface of a slow-moving sea. After days of dense beech forest and steep alpine terrain, the openness was startling, almost disorienting. The sky felt enormous above us, uninterrupted by canopy or ridgeline, and the valley stretched ahead in a wide, gentle corridor that seemed to breathe with a different kind of beauty than the mountains had offered. It was softer here, more pastoral, the kind of landscape that slows the heart rate and loosens the shoulders and lets the eyes rest on distant horizons instead of the next foothold.

We followed the river downstream this time, and there was a quiet pleasure in that simple reversal. For days we had been walking upriver, climbing toward saddles and passes, fighting gravity with every step. Now the water flowed in our direction, and we flowed with it, the gentle downhill gradient a kindness to legs that had earned every metre of easy ground the trail was willing to give. The river ran beside us through the grasslands, its voice softer here than in the steep-sided valleys above, a murmur rather than a roar, its waters spreading wide and shallow over beds of pale stone.

Along the way, we passed a hunter who was packing up his camp and preparing to leave, his rifle cased and his gear stacked with the practised efficiency of someone who knew this valley well. We exchanged brief greetings, the easy nod of acknowledgement between people who share the backcountry for different reasons but with the same respect for the land, and continued on.

Waiau Hut appeared not long after, a smaller but newer shelter sitting in the valley with the quiet confidence of a well-built thing in the right place. It was compact and clean, the kind of backcountry hut that feels looked after, its timber still carrying a warmth of colour that older huts lose to decades of weather and wood smoke. We were the only ones there, and the solitude after days of sharing huts with other trampers felt like an unexpected luxury. The three of us, Anth, Torrin, and Graham, spread out across the bunks with the contentment of people who have an entire hut to themselves and nowhere else they need to be.

But there was a problem, and it lived in our food bags. The zero day at Blue Lake, necessary as it had been for Anth's recovery, had cost us a day's worth of meals from supplies calculated to last exactly as long as the section demanded. We were going to come up a day short. The maths was simple and unforgiving, and no amount of creative rationing was going to stretch what remained across the kilometres still to come.

Torrin had a solution. He headed back along the trail to find the hunter we had passed earlier, and returned with a grin and a generous portion of fresh venison. The hunter had been more than willing to share, another act of backcountry generosity from a stranger who understood that out here, you help the people you meet because the mountains are big enough to humble everyone eventually. Back at the hut, Torrin set to work. His skills as a chef, honed through years of cooking in professional kitchens before the trail had claimed him, came into their own in the most unlikely of settings. With the venison and whatever remained in his pack, a handful of dried ingredients, some seasoning, the odds and ends that accumulate at the bottom of a food bag, he produced a meal that had no business being as good as it was. The hut filled with the smell of seared meat and herbs, and we ate like kings in our little shelter in the valley, the fresh protein a gift to bodies that had been running on dehydrated meals and trail mix for days. It was one of those trail meals that transcends its ingredients, elevated by hunger and effort and the simple miracle of fresh food in the backcountry.

The sandflies, however, were appalling. They descended on us in clouds, those tiny, silent, relentless creatures that are the one true plague of the New Zealand backcountry, finding every inch of exposed skin and leaving behind an itch that outlasts the memory of whatever view you were admiring when they struck. We retreated inside the hut and battened down what we could, but they found their way through gaps and vents with the determination of creatures whose entire existence is organised around the pursuit of blood. Both Torrin and Graham, drawing on their respective reservoirs of trail experience, agreed that as bad as the sandflies were here, they were worse in the Richmond Ranges. Somewhere up in those northern mountains, they said, there was a hut where the sandflies reached a level of ferocity that made this feel like a mild inconvenience. It was not a comforting thought, but it did offer the strange consolation of knowing that things could, apparently, always be worse.

As dusk fell and the light softened across the valley, painting the grasslands in shades of amber and violet, the deer appeared. Several of them, emerging from the bush fringe at the edge of the clearing to graze in the open ground, their movements cautious but unhurried, their ears turning like radar dishes at every small sound. We watched them from the hut in silence, barely breathing, not wanting to disturb the scene unfolding before us. There is something profoundly calming about watching wild animals go about their business at the end of a long day, something that reconnects you to the simplicity of the world beyond human concerns. The deer moved through the golden grass with a grace that made the valley feel like their living room and us the privileged guests, and we watched until the last of the light faded and the animals dissolved into the gathering dark like ghosts returning to the forest that had made them.

We turned in for the night, full of venison and gratitude, the hut quiet around us, the valley holding its breath outside. Tomorrow we would walk on toward Boyle Village and the end of this section. But tonight, the deer and the fire and the meal that Torrin had conjured from almost nothing were enough to make the world feel complete.Read more