Photo reads - After the kill, the shooter leaps from the helicopter (top of page), slices a hole in the deer's lower hind leg, threads a rope through it and waits for the 'copter to come in. Then he hooks the rope to a safety catch (above), jumps back in, and they're away.

Article reads - THE ONLY PUBLIC BAR in Te Anau is called the Grubstake. Around a periphery float a few tourists temporarily stranded on the Mt Cook-Queenstown-Te Anau-Milford tourist trek. But they disappear fairly early on in the evenings and retreat to the seclusion of their house bars - with names like the Ranch House Bar and with toy saddles to sit on. Perhaps the Savloned skull of a cow to gaze at. In huts scattered throughout the Fiordland National Park, helicopter pilots and their shooters watch the clouds banking up from the southwest, watch the wind as it keens down from the tops and ruffles the sheltered pastureland. If they went out into that, up and over the tops, they'd be hitting 45 to 60-knot winds. A good way to bend a helicopter. So they scrape the congealed fat and smelly bones from their dixies, wipe down the greasy knives and forks between thumb and finger, dry their hands and anything else on the backsides of their denims, throw the stag carcass belching blood, liver and spleen into the boot of their car, and head into town, 100 kilometers away.

"Jeezuz, what a piss-off," mutters pilot Gordon Kane. "But it'd be stupid eh, going out and sitting on the margin all the time. Because it's only a matter of time you're going to end up bending the machine. You can go out, you can run the safety line, you can be sitting on the red line all the time, on the safety margin. Next day you won't make it..." Back in the Grubstake - maybe they called home first, maybe they haven't - that sort of helicopter talk merges with sexual banter and tales of the ones (human and animal) that got away into a kind of homogeneous badinage, so that in the end it doesn't matter who's sitting at which table, because work is the only topic of conversation, and everyone does the same work. The last of the tourists slides out as a noisy squabble develops over the relative merits in bed of New Zealand Australian girls. No one wins the argument, because there is a lack of authoritative experience. So the talk suddenly switches to the two deer that Morrie Kane bulldogged at the same time, the three of them rolling arse over kite and over each other down a steep hill. The two conversations flow into each other.

WHILE THE BEER and the badinage flow into the Grubstake, the quarry huddles on the sides of the fiords, awaiting the next round, bunkered down in the forest cover from the wind, the rain and the mist.

Deer, says Nelson Thompson, an owner-shooter of Thompson Helicopters, one of the five helicopter companies operating in the park, have got to socialize. When the rain and heavy weather pass, and the bush is dripping, they come out to do their socializing. And that's when the helicopter gunships lift off, hover for a moment in the chill air flowing off the fiords, then fly off to find the deer, armed with their deadly cargo of Armalite rifles. net guns, drug darts, radio darts, electric stun guns and knives.

Since it officially began in 1970, the helicopter deer slaughter technology has taken around 90,000 animals from the park, dead or alive. That is an official figure, and according to Wally Sander, Chief Ranger for the Park Board, probably from half to twice as many again have been taken out as a result of poaching and other activities.

It's impossible to deduce just what this means in cash terms. At the present-day price of around $150 for a 100lb carcass, it suggests earning of between $13 million and $20 million for the past eight years. Live animals, however, are worth considerably more - around $1500 for an average animal - so that would bring the earnings to between $135 million and $202 million. The real figure lies somewhere between those two extremes: the ratio of dead to live animals recovered is not known. But it's big money, big business. The noxious pest is a goldmine.

BUT NOW, as the helicopter butt and swing their way over the tops, skim up the headbasins and wash over the flats, the noxious pests are ready for them. They can hear the choppers coming long before they see them, they know where they're coming from, and, most of all, they know what it means for them. There's no way that the hunters are, as a general rule, going to go home empty-handed; but there's no way, either, that they're going to have things their own way. "We've educated the deer" says Nelson Thompson. "I might be sitting on a live deer and the machine's gone home with a load. When he comes back that deer is up and kicking. By joves, their old ears can rotate 360 degrees. It knows where that machine to come from a long time before you can hear it. And you get it in little fawns, deer only, say, two months old. Its an instinct being built into them."

The sound of a helicopter will send most deer into bush cover where they're virtually impossible to to spot; but others will lie down, as still as death, while the helicopter passes over, perhaps only metres away. "You can fly over them three or four times," says Gordon Kane, "and you won't see a thing. But then one might lose a nerve, turn it's head - and we've got it."

Kane operates his own rotor wash of nervous turbulence, His staccato chatter leaps from one deer catching experience to another. And he'll frequently, halfway through a thought, race off at a tangent with something else: so that he finds himself pausing momentarily to check what he was saying before he started saying something else. "Hey Morrie, what was i saying...?" Finish that thought, start finishing the other, and then spin off in another direction...

You can get a buzz flying a helicopter round and round a skyscraper/you get on a deer now/it's not just gonna stand there and make it easy for you to get on to/eh?/it's gonna piss off

to be continued