My
wife, also an avid Montana hunter, is a
naturalized US citizen but
grew up in Switzerland.
My Mother-in-Law Gerda and her late husband Traugott were long-time hunters in Switzerland.
Unfortunately Traugott passed away shortly before I met my wife, but I got to
know Gerda well. She has an impressive array of shooting medals herself and is
the only person I know who has participated in a hunter’s biathlon at
age…whoops, sorry, I can’t reveal that particular information. Suffice to say
it was a credible performance for any age. She still hunts in her home canton
(state) of Zurich, but no longer pursues chamois
and ibex high in the Alps in the canton of Graubünden.
A Swiss hunter's home.
You have to really love the hunt to become a licensed jaeger in Switzerland. When my wife took the
class many years ago, they had to learn and were tested on a wide variety of
subjects. These included both game and non-game species of animals and birds
and their habits, identification of trees and shrubs, hunting dogs, firearms
including the inner workings of various actions, ammunition and ballistics, and
optics. If you failed a single topic you could re-take that particular topic
over, but if you failed more than one you had to re-take the entire test. Today
the exam focuses on the most practical subjects, but a new hunter must first
serve a 3-three year working apprenticeship with a hunting lease group. Members
of these groups have a variety of other conservation-related tasks to perform
besides hunting.
Game where Gerda lives includes roe deer, wild pigs, fox,
badger, hare and the quail-like wachtel. Up in the mountains they also
have Hirsch, which are related to our wapiti or elk, the nimble little gams
or chamois, and the noble king of the heights, the Steinbok or ibex.
The Swiss also have some traditions that go with their
hunting. When an animal is killed, a ceremonial “last meal” of local vegetation
is placed in its mouth, a tradition my wife and I carry on with our own deer,
pronghorn and elk. It is also a widely-practiced custom to eat the testicles of
one’s first buck, properly cooked, of course. Some hunters also share a bit of “medicinal”
mountain schnapps from a hip flask at the conclusion of a successful hunt.
Others, when they haul away their Hirsch, turn its head back for one last look
at the mountains. In many areas, most notably Graubünden, the mountain hunting
season ends with the celebration of the St. Hubertus Festival, where thanks are
given to the patron saint of hunters. I learned fellow hunters were wishing me
luck when they said, “Weidmannsheil.” The proper response is, “Weidmannsdank.”
During our last visit to Switzerland
in May 2017, Gerda was able to take me hunting for roe deer as a guest, but
before I could get a hunting license (Jagdpass)
and insurance I had to first pass the shooting test. For this, we drove to the Jagdschiessandlage
Embrach where the shooting range is nestled in the bottom of a deep draw
surrounded by forest. A slight breeze rustled the three banners on the
flagpoles out front, the Swiss flag in the middle, the Canton of Zurich to the
left, and the City of Embrach’s
crest to the right.
Inside the main range building, various European mounts and a few full heads
hung high on the walls, including some nice moose and caribou bagged long ago,
I was told, by the founders of the range. There was the traditional schutzengarten
where you could sit down at a table and order a brat and a beverage. We
signed in at the front desk and got hearing protection. Outside, to the left,
the trap and skeet shooters were banging away with their shotguns while to the
right the more infrequent but sharper bark of rifles sounded.
We donned our shooting earmuffs and opened the door to the
rifle firing line, which was protected by a low-hanging roof in front and
walled in on three sides. Along the front, the rifle shooters were firing from
benches. Along the back wall, I glanced at the weapons leaning into individual
slots within a long, communal gun rack running the entire length of the line.
Typical high-end European hunting rifles with plenty of scrollwork and
expensive, quality optics were most common, and virtually all of the shotguns
were double-barrels, primarily over-and-unders. There were a few drillings as
well, the traditional European break-action guns with multiple barrels
incorporating both shotgun and rifle into one. But there were very few old war
horses here, just one lonely sporterized Swiss K-31 and a couple of German ‘98
Mausers. A lone Mossberg Patrol rifle with an extended magazine really stood
out on that rack with its cammo finish. Traugott always shot competition and
hunted with his "Army rifles", customized K-31s, one in the standard 7.5x55mm Swiss cartridge and
one converted to single-shot and re-barreled for the oddball 10.3x60mm Rimmed
cartridge, roughly equivalent to the old British .450/400 Express, which is the
only legal caliber for big game hunting in the Canton of Graubünden.
The canton shooting test I had to pass before hunting big game consisted of putting
four out of four shots within the 8-ring on a 10-ring target. The target
itself, the Jagdshutzen, most commonly depicts a life-sized picture of a
roebuck standing at the grassy edge of a woodline. Shot at 100 meters, the
subdued, concentric rings of the scoring bullseye cannot be distinguished by
the shooter even through a scope, just as if you were shooting at a real deal.
A similar target depicting a chamois is shot at 150 meters. The target is 86x122
cm, or roughly 2 feet 9 inches by four feet.
The 100-meter rehbock qualification target.
I watched the action and some of the other shooters while we waited for a lane
on the firing line to come open. On the far right, there was also small game
practice and qualification going on. This consisted of shooting shotguns with
lead shot at a running rabbit target consisting of three separate metal plates,
any or all of which will fall if hit, at a range of 30 meters. There is also a
moving wild boar target shot at 50 meters but no one was doing that particular
course on that afternoon.
In all honesty, having grown up wing-shooting pheasants and
quail, I thought the running rabbit was partially lame and moving rather slowly
and was surprised at how many people couldn’t hit it. Likewise, watching a few
of the riflemen score their targets, I was also a little dismayed by some of
the dinner-plate-sized 3-shot groups fired at 100 meters. Then Gerda explained
that Wednesdays were partially reserved for the newest and youngest hunters who
were practicing or preparing to take their tests.
I had borrowed Gerda’s main hunting rifle, which I was only passingly familiar
with, so when a lane came open I settled into position with it to do a few
dry-fires. It was a bolt-action Blaser SR 850/88 Repetierbüchse, old
enough that it is stamped “W. Germany” on the
barrel, and decorated with scrollwork. It was chambered for my own favorite
hunting cartridge, the good old .30-06 Springfield,
or the 7.62x66mm in Metric, which also remains fairly popular in Europe. It wears a variable-power Leupold VX-3i 4.25-10x
scope with the big light-drinking 50-mm objective bell and “Max Light
Management System” with the adjustable illuminated Duplex reticle. Gerda got it
specifically to shoot wildschwein under low light conditions.
I worked the butter-knife Mannlicher-style bolt handle and closed the bolt on
an empty chamber, after which I had to push the bolt handle forward to
disengage the safety. A 3-position manual safety switch in front of the bolt
handle allows one to lock the action and safety, work the bolt and have the
handle safety re-engage after every shot, or work the bolt freely without the
safety re-engaging. Gerda prefers to have the safety re-engage after every
shot, but this proved to be more inconvenient for me since I shoot left-handed.
The trigger was nice and crisp, but much lighter than I am used to, so I
dry-fired and worked the action a few times to get a feel for the controls.
When I felt I was ready, I nodded to my wife and she handed
me a single .30-06 cartridge. Gerda’s friend Robert reloads ammunition for her
and I had checked the multi-national recipe on the box; American 168-grain
Speer boat-tailed softpoints and CCI Large Rifle Primers, German RWS brass, and
Finnish Vitori powder.
At the range, all rounds were single-loaded; one wasn’t
supposed to load the magazine. I snuggled down into a solid shooting position,
disengaged the safety and laid my finger alongside the trigger guard, and
centered the crosshairs to squeeze one off. Still not quite “at one” with the
light trigger, I called a flier right and the recoil surprised me as seeming
fairly stout. My wife and I both hunt with fairly lightweight .30-06s firing
180-grain loads.
We decided to check the target after only one shot just to
find a starting point for zeroing it for my eye. The range, of course, ran like
a Swiss watch. The big game targets were suspended on rollers from overhead
steel cables. With the push of a button, a big electric motor kicked in and one
target rode back from the 100-meter berm to be marked or scored at the firing
line while another passed it going out-bound in the opposite direction, ready
for the next shot. My first round was roughly three inches to the right but
exactly where it needed to be for elevation so, considering the flier, I
decided to fire a 3-shot group.
I did a little better this time, with no fliers called, and while the group was
just a hair shy of one Minute-of-Angle it was neatly centered right in the
middle of the ten-ring. I decided to call it good and put away my notebook. I
was pleasantly surprised that Gerda’s zero was the same as mine; I had been
expecting to have to adjust the windage and elevation and wanted to write down
the clicks so we could return it to her zero afterwards.
By then, however, the young hunters in training were
beginning their attempts at qualification, and there were a considerable number
of them. It would be quite some time until the 100-meter lanes opened up again.
Rather than wait, I was given the option of shooting my test at the 150-meter
chamois target.
To save time, I qualified on the gamsbock (chamois) target at 150 meters.
Hardly my best group, but good enough to pass the test on the first go-round.
Qualification was shot from a rectangular frame representing the window of a
shooting stand. Not sure off the top of my head exactly where a strange load
would hit at 150 meters, I held the crosshairs approximately two inches high.
That, and a flier called low, loosened up my group a bit. Still, I did qualify
on the first go-round with two 10s, a 9 and an 8 (the flier). I’m pretty
confident I could have gotten a perfect score had I been able to shoot the rehbock at 100 meters.
Just on general principles, I am very much against any and all addition
government regulation with regards to the Second Amendment…they already have far
too much trouble interpreting even simple phrases like, “…shall not be
infringed.” But the idea of a shooter
qualification for hunting does have some merit. Even in Montana I’ve occasionally seen some abysmal
marksmanship and almost painful ignorance of rifle ballistics over the years.
The beautiful countryside of the Zurich Oberland near where we hunted.
A couple of evenings later, Gerda took me out to the hunting area she leases
with a group of hunters. She lives in the Zurich Oberland. The area consists of
rolling green hills topped with hardwood dominated forests alternated between
villages, farms, and fields and on clear days the snow-capped peaks of the Alps gleam in the sun across the horizon. As we drove
along the narrow gravel road between farm fields, I was reminded that back home
in Montana we
are much further north latitude-wise. The local crops were more than a month
ahead of ours. It was the 9th of May but many farmers were already
getting their first cutting of hay and the field of peas we passed were
knee-high and in full blossom.
We were seeking the western rhe or
roe deer (Capreolus capreolus…hey, I had to memorize the genus and
species of a bunch of critters in college almost thirty years ago and have
never once had the opportunity to actually use it so…Capreolus capreolus.)
Anyway, the roe deer is fairly small, perhaps half the size at
most of the North American whitetail (Odocoileus virginianus), being
just over two foot high at the shoulder and weighing, on average, about 66
pounds. There aren’t known for wall-hanger racks; three points per side is
normal for an adult, and four-pointers are rare and considered really
something. Roebucks actually grow their horns in winter rather than summer,
scraping off the velvet in March to be ready for breeding in late July and
early August. This gives them a chance to fatten back up before winter. So that
the fawns are born in May when the vegetation is greening up, the fertilized
eggs of the bred doe form a blastocyst (look it up…I had to) so that the embryo
does not begin to develop until early January.
As we were driving down a narrow gravel farm two-track towards the hunting
stand, I said, “Well, lookie there.” Out in the middle of a hay field were two
roe deer and their summer coats really did shine red in the slanting rays of
the late afternoon soon. Gerda braked her Subaru Outback to a halt and whipped
out her Swarovski 7x42 binoculars, focusing on the deer and informing me that
one was a legal buck. Then they were gone, bounding like a pair of dogs through
the tall grass and disappearing into the forest. Their tails are small and you
don’t see the waving white flag of the whitetail as they flee. Silhouetted
against light green leaves for a moment, I could just make out the rehbock’s
forked antlers with the naked eye as he gained the timber.
Even though we’d spooked the deer, it was still quite early, about 1530, so we
took a chance that they would be back. Gerda said reh tended to only
sprint a short distance and then hide up in thick cover. She parked up a gravel
lane well into the forest and we walked back to the hunting stand, approaching
it cautiously and quietly and glassing ahead…just in case.
The stand we hunted from.
Her hunting group builds and maintains the stands. It was a nice new elevated
stand on a lattice of poles, the floor ten or twelve feet above the ground.
Inside, it had a swivel chair and the floor, walls, and window sills were all
carpeted to muffle noise. Facing south, we opened the shooting windows on three
sides to look out over a field of hay and an adjoining one of peas, with a
field of flax bearing bright mustard yellow blooms beyond. Past the crop fields
stood the red-tiled roofs of a cluster of farm buildings, with brown and white Guernseys grazing nearby. Behind us and to our left,
running along the edges of the fields, was the forest, predominantly hardwoods
in full leaf. Some of the flora I recognized as being the same or very similar
to species found “back home” in Montana;
mountain maple, raspberry, and alder. Others were new to me and I had to ask
Gerda what they were; buche (beech), schwarzdorn (blackthorn) and
hartriegel (dogwood).
A few other things were different from what I was used to,
most notably being on the approach route to a large international airport and
having fat-bodied jetliners roaring overhead every few minutes. Back home, the
nearest airport (Bozeman)
is sixty miles away and on the other side of a mountain range. When the breeze
was just right, I could faintly hear cowbells tinkling in the distance and
once, on the hour, I heard the low gonging of church bells rolling across the
landscape.
We dug out Gerda’s Bushnell range-finder, for I like to range several landmarks
within my hunting area when I take a stand so I will know where the deer will
be within shooting distances, but the battery was dead. Range estimation was
done the old-fashioned way with the Mark I Eyeball but, checking out the field
afterwards on Google Earth, proved pretty accurate.
I was happy using the old pair of binos I had found hanging
in Gerda’s garden shed, well-used black Swarovski Habicht 7x42s of probably
1970’s vintage, but she insisted I take her new green rubber armored SLC
Swarovskis. I glassed the edge of the woods intensely. As an old armored
cavalry scout, we call it looking through the “wall of green.” By
constantly and minutely fine-tuning the focus on your field glasses, you can
train yourself to look through thinner intervening foliage and see deeper into
the forest itself. It wasn’t easy here for hazel brush, maple and seedlings
crowd the edges of the woods, reaching for sunlight with their leaves.
Within the first few minutes, however, I just happened to
spot a deer. A shaft of sunlight from the setting sun angled through the leaves
into the woods to briefly illuminate the rump of a deer before it stepped
behind the smooth gray trunk of a large beech tree. Watching that edge
intently, twice more I saw movement, only a patch of hide visible for a moment
through the leaves, but it was the proper color and moved right, as a deer
would while slipping through cover.
Something told me the deer would come back out. I watched the projecting finger
of forest where the movement had been, but nothing ever came out; the deer must
have turned left to stay inside the wood line. I think Gerda wondered if I was
seeing things. After about an hour passed with no further movement, I began to
wonder a bit myself. At one point I was surprised to see a couple of wachtel
fly out of the edge of the forest and coast across the field. For awhile after
that I glassed harder, wondering if the deer had flushed the birds out. As is
so often the case, no matter how hard I sought to spot the deer en route, in
the end they simply appeared.
After a long stretch of silence, around 2000 hours the doe dashed out of the
far woodline and into the tall grass and hay where she stopped abruptly,
looking around. Several seconds later, the buck ran out of the trees to join
her, and now his little forkhorn antlers were readily visible. We watched
intently through the binoculars. Where the deer emerged from cover was well in
excess of 200 meters from the stand. Back home, with my own rifle zeroed for
maximum point blank range and fired from a solid rest, it would have been an
easy enough shot, but it was too far for the particular circumstances with an
unfamiliar weapon zeroed at 100 meters.
Fortunately, the deer worked their way straight out into the field, and as they
did so they brought themselves steadily closer to us. They would feed freely
for a minute or two, then the doe would get fidgety and run 30 or 40 meters
before stopping to eat again, and the buck would soon follow suit each time.
Their course took them down through an otherwise unnoticeable draw where the
grass appeared to come up past their bellies. As we waited, I noticed the wind
start to pick up a bit, blowing from right to left and full deflection, but as
yet not a considerable factor. It was also darkening quickly as black rain
clouds crept closer and thunder began to mutter and rumble off in the distance,
slowly but discernibly growing closer.
Finally, the deer approached the point that would bring them closest to the
stand. I rested the forearm of the rifle on my hand on the carpeted shooting
window and studied the buck through the scope. I was steady and could keep the
crosshairs on the vitals area. The range was right about 150 meters, I judged,
and although the wind was again on the increase it wasn’t too brisk yet. The
time had come, I thought, where I could make a clean shot and I reached to
disengage the safety.
Just then, something on the far side of the fields spooked the deer and they
took off running, bounding gracefully through the tall grass and weaving back
and forth. From their initial trajectory it looked like they would pass almost
directly beneath our stand before they reached the woodline. Many thoughts
raced through my head; excitement from having a chance to hunt on another
continent mixed with a sinking heart that this buck would get away. No matter
how close they came, I had already decided I would not take a running shot with
a rifle I had only put eight rounds through. Back in Montana, when the deer run I imitate the
cough-like alarm call of the whitetail, and this usually causes them to stop,
look, and listen long enough to get a good standing shot in. I briefly
considered making my deer call but wondered if hollering out in
"'Murican" to Swiss-speaking deer might just spook them further. So I
only watched the action excitedly and gave a small mental sigh that they would
get away.
Fortunately, they both stopped to look back while only fifty meters away from
our stand. I could no longer shoot from the sitting position in the chair, but
had already risen into a crouch. I was still able to rest the rifle securely on
the padded sill between the fingers of my support hand and settled the
crosshairs just behind the buck’s shoulder; he jumped into focus, looming
large, since the scope’s variable power was still set on 10x magnification.
Everything froze for that unique moment in time when the hunt
all comes together. I took a quick breath, let half of it out, and paused
before stroking the trigger. This time, when the Blaser cracked, I did not
notice any recoil at all. The buck made one slow motion jump forward then
faltered attempting to make a sluggish second hop with his front legs and piled
up lifelessly, disappearing from our sight in the high grass. As I had trained
for many years, I instinctively worked the bolt smoothly but rapidly and
forcefully through its cycle to chamber another round in case a follow-up shot
was needed. Gerda said it was not and she was right; the deer was down before I
finished working the bolt. Only peripherally did my mind register the doe
bounding away.
My little rehbock with Gerda's Blaser .30-06.
I was ecstatic and for a moment couldn’t speak, checking the
safety and leaning the rifle up in the corner. Then I was thanking and hugging
Gerda and we were both laughing excitedly. Silently, in my head, I thanked God
for the chain of events which had led up to a perfect shot. Honestly, I had
been happy to just have the opportunity to hunt a rehbock in Switzerland;
actually getting one on my first hunt was unbelievable.
Picking the rifle up from the corner, I cleared it and then found the empty
case on the floor. Collecting our gear, we closed the windows and door and
climbed down from the stand. For the last hour the sky had been growing
increasingly threatening and now, just as we left the stand, the first drops of
rain began to pelt down upon us as we headed through the high grass towards the
buck’s final resting place.
There he was, dead, with a tiny, neat entrance wound behind
the shoulder. The exit wound showed that the 168-grain Speer had indeed
expanded well even at close range on a small deer. My first thought was that I
was a little amazed at just how small he was; I've had bigger dogs. But that
was just a passing observation and didn't interfere with my happiness at
bagging him.
It's tradition to give the animal a "last meal."
After a few quick photographs, I dragged him to the two-track gravel road
skirting the edge of the field while Gerda went to get the car. Reaching the
stand and the woodline, I finally remembered to give the buck his traditional
last meal, pulling up a handful of lush green grass and placing it in his
mouth. As the rain began to increase, I shucked off my coat to cover the rifle
and binoculars while I waited and stood there looking down at the buck, still
more than a little stunned and euphoric at our success.
We put the buck in a large plastic tote in the back of Gerda’s Subaru Outback
and drove one of the narrow gravel roads through the darkening forest to the Jadghutte,
the neat little cabin the hunters of that area use and share. Nearby, a chain
was stretched between two trees, with gambrel hooks hanging from it. This was
the first deer I ever lifted straight up in front of me and hung with ease. It
made me think of my wife’s fat, stocky four-point mule deer buck of the
previous hunting season back home. I had had to tie its feet together, hang the
rope around my neck, and lift with hands and legs both just to get him up onto
the tailgate of the pickup truck.
We weighed the rehbock whole at 15,29 kilos (33.71 lbs) and
field-dressed at 13,9 kilos (30.6 lbs). Gerda tagged him and recorded the information,
which is incorporated into a monthly report by her hunting group that is sent
in to the canton, whose officials determine the harvest numbers.
I met several of Gerda’s fellow hunters at one of their many
informal get-togethers at the Jadghutte a few nights later, two other
women and six men, including a father and son. Despite the language barrier
(what little German I learned in the Army in 1986-1988 is awful rusty) everyone
was very friendly, welcoming me to their jaeger fold, and all seemed
genuinely happy for my success. I could only thank Gerda and a healthy dose of
good luck. One of the other hunters had just retired and expressed an interest
in coming to Montana
to hunt elk with us someday. I hope he does so I can return the favor, although
we all knew full well that my success two hours into the first hunt is
definitely the exception rather than the rule. Gerda's friend Ursina has come here rehbock hunting eight times now and has yet to get a shot.
