Someone who didn’t know Lech-elle – with her white-blonde hair, immaculate nails and tiny, doll-like frame – might picture her putting a fluffy teddy bear

on the shrine in her brother’s room to keep him company through the night. But she was five when she fired a rifle for the first time; the bullet shell is from her.

Country kids, they grew up around guns, hunting with their father, Brian, and their granddad Poppa since they were nippers. When they sat their firearms licence to-gether, Lechelle outscored Aron on the test.

Excited about landing a plumbing appren-ticeship, due to start two days after he was killed, Aron had headed into the Taraweras determined to shoot his first deer. It was a coming-of-age that was never to happen. So Lechelle shot one for him.

“He died doing something he loved, but he didn’t achieve his goal,” she says, show-ing pictures of her cradling the hind she took down with one clean shot through the chest. “That was my goal for Aron. He can’t enjoy the meat, he couldn’t be in the photo-graphs, but he was right there with me and I cried for him like a little girl. That empty shell from the first kill of a deer is his.”

In July 2008, Garth Porter pleaded guilty to carelessly using a firearm causing death and was sentenced to five months’ home detention and 250 hours of community service. Aron had been going out with his daughter, Nicole, for two and a half years, but since his funeral, the two families have broken contact. Porter, a Napier businessman, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Lechelle is now 19 – older than her big brother was when he died. She’s stood in the bush where he was shot and, like her parents, still struggles to understand how the accident happened. “Before you open your eyes in the morning, you see it, that haunting image,” she says.

At the time, there were calls from the deer-stalking community for Porter to face a manslaughter charge.

Her mother, Lorraine, will never forget coming home that day to find a policeman sitting in her kitchen.

“You put it to the back of your head and when people at work ask how you are, you say, ‘Good, thanks.’ Then you come home and think about it again before you go to bed. But you hold yourself together and get up the next day. I’ve been doing that for two and a half years.”

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A shell casing sits on a chest of drawers in Aron Timm’s bedroom, next to his sports trophies, his Calvin Klein deodorant and the box that con-

tains his ashes. But it isn’t from the bullet that killed him.

On the day before his 19th birthday in March 2008, Aron was hunting in the Tarawera Ranges with his girlfriend’s father when the older man heard a noise in the bush. Aiming at what he thought was a deer, he shot the teenager through the heart and lungs as he leant against a cabbage tree just a few metres off the track.

People are affected differently by grief. Aron’s father withdrew, leaving the family home in Taradale and moving to Australia because he couldn’t stand being in the same country as the man who’d shot his son.

Aron’s mother, Lorraine, remembered the handsome boy “with an old head on young shoulders” who’d helped nurse her through a brush with illness several years before.

His little sister stocked up her ammuni-tion belt and went out with his gun.

joanna wane is north & South ’s deputy editor. photography by simon young and jane ussher.

in the

line of fireShould hunters be held

to greater account if they fail to ensure it’s

an animal – not a human being – in their

sights before they pull the trigger?

Joanna Wane reports.

Taradale teenager Lechelle Timms cradles her brother Aron’s gun – returned to the family

after he was shot and killed in a hunting accident. “His guns were his babies.”

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Maine was found not guilty of manslaughter after killing a young mother hanging out clothes in her rural backyard, apparently because the white mittens she was wearing looked like deer tails.

About now, as the grass starts to green, the first deer-stalkers will be pulling on their boots for a spot of spring hunting. But it’s

around Easter during “the roar”, when stags call for a mate, that the central North Island bush heaves with more traffic than rush hour on Queen St.

Given the estimated 260,000 hours spent deer hunting each year, fatalities are rela-tively rare – on average, one hunter is acci-dentally shot dead by another every nine months. But the human cost is heartbreaking. In 2009, on the opening day of the duck-shooting season, Napier father of two Michael Meehan was killed by a member of his own family who was walking behind him and tripped, accidentally discharging his gun.

Then there are those who survive.Veteran deerstalker Nigel Ross knows the

terrible damage a high-calibre bullet does to an animal. So when a shot slammed into his shoulder, lacerating his lung and shear-ing off four ribs millimetres from his spine, he looked up at his hunting mate, Winston Handcock, and croaked, “I’ve had it.”

The pair were walking back to their car on a gravel road in the Kaimanawa Forest when a truck swung round the corner car-rying two men spotlighting for deer. “I heard the crack of the rifle and the first shot hit the ground between us,” recalls Hand-cock. “I threw myself into a depression next to the road and started digging my way through to China.”

A second shot winged Ross, who was wear-ing a headlamp. (It was later claimed in court that the shooter, who was spotlighting ille-gally, mistook the bluish LED light for the eye of a deer.) Handcock bundled Ross into the men’s truck and phoned ahead for an ambulance to meet them at the main road. “They asked what colour the truck was and I said it was red; it was actually grey but blood running out the door was all I saw.”

He then drove the ambulance himself “at full whip” to Taupo Hospital, where he’d arranged for an emergency team to be on standby. Ross was given 12 units of blood and stabilised before being flown by heli-copter to Waikato.

A year later, the 70-year-old has made a good recovery but has no use of his shoulder

by fellow coroner Christopher Devonport in 2008 following the death of Aron Timms in strikingly similar circumstances.

Three years after Bain’s findings were re-leased, he is clearly frustrated at the lack of action. He told North & South his report seemed to have “fallen into a hole some-where”, despite the proposal receiving warm support from a number of legal colleagues.

“It has to be brought home to hunters – if you fire and you’re not absolutely certain, there’s no defence and you’re likely to go to jail for a period of time,” he says.

“The Coroners Act says we are to look at the general circumstances and draw to pub-lic attention any matters which, if drawn to their attention, may help save a life on a future occasion. Well, this will save lives on a future occasion.”

Dr Warren Young, deputy president of the Law Commission, disagrees. He says the commission has not received any reference from the government and did not regard it as an issue of merit that required independ-ent investigation.

Crown prosecutor Simon Moore has res-ervations, too, about the effectiveness of a law change. Although he’s never prosecut-ed such a case, he saw first-hand the ter-rible consequences of a hunting death when he was at university and a friend in his mid-20s shot and killed his best mate.

“He was obsessively careful and an expe-rienced hunter who swore black and blue that he saw antlers and a deer,” says Moore. “It was absolutely awful.

“The thing is you’re generally dealing with responsible people who are devastated by the consequences of their actions and will probably never pick up a firearm to venture into the bush again. That’s why very often you get in these sorts of cases perverse ver-dicts from juries, who see how utterly racked with grief the individual is [and don’t want the consequences of a conviction].”

Police are currently looking at whether an existing offence of discharging a firearm “with reckless disregard for the safety of others” should be promoted as an alterna-tive charge. A middle ground between care-less use and manslaughter, it carries a maximum sentence of seven years in jail.

New Zealand law already takes a relative-ly hard line compared to countries such as the United States. There, accidental shoot-ings are often viewed as reasonable mistakes and “buck fever” – where the excitement of the chase overrides rational thinking and the eye sees what the mind wants to believe – is a recognised defence. In 1989, a hunter in

Taupo coroner Dr Wallace Bain found Lee had not properly identified his target, relying on what he thought were antlers and the possibility of a head (a patch of brown that was, in fact, Gillies’ face as he stood barely 16 metres away in dense bush).

Such accidents were a tragedy, wrote Bain, himself a keen huntsman. “Mates who have been hunting together for 20 to 30 years end up in a situation where one of them is dead, the one that fires the deadly shot is devastated, and two families’ lives almost invariably will never be the same again.”

In his findings, Bain called for tougher laws to hold hunters more accountable and urged the Law Commission to “urgently investigate” a change in legislation to make the offence one of strict liability, essentially shifting the burden of proof.

Instead of a jury having to decide what amounted to carelessness – taking into account factors such as the surrounding circumstances, the terrain, the weather and the time of day – the prosecution would only have to prove the facts of what happened, while the person charged would be required to prove an absence of fault.

“The issue here is target identification, and if a hunter chooses to fire at an object that is not the whole body of a deer, then the risks of doing so must fall with the hunter.”

Bain’s recommendations were reiterated

been out hunting again. She still won’t ac-knowledge him if they happen across each other in town.

Ironically, William Gillies was troubled by arthritis in his knees and had already decided it would be his last hunting trip. Together since high school, with four adult children, the couple had also weathered Bronwyn’s recent brush with cancer.

“We were getting to the stage where we were going to do things together – have our time. Now that’s not going to happen.

“Willie was a lovely, quiet sort of guy. My parents thought the world of him; his death really threw them. They’ve never been the same since. My son, who was so strong, just crumbled recently. I believe we’re still griev-ing and going through things now.

“The only way I can handle it is knowing he went in the bush, doing something he really loved.”

O ne of the key arguments in Lee’s defence was that he really did have a deer in his sights but somehow Gillies’ head had popped up in be-

tween at the moment he pulled the trigger.Velocity tests conducted after the trial

and presented at a coroner’s hearing showed that was simply not possible because of the speed of the bullet.

quite extraordinary that when a person discharges a firearm, he is not always ac-countable for where the bullet goes.”

In Taupo, Bronwyn Gillies knew better than most what both families were going through. In 2005, her husband William was killed when the friend he’d been hunting with for 35 years opened fire on what he thought was a deer and shot his mate in the head.

Bernard Lee admitted firing the fatal bul-let but pleaded not guilty to careless use of a firearm causing death. At his trial, the jury initially told the judge they couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict before finally returning an acquittal.

Five years later, the anger and bitterness is still fresh in Bronwyn Gillies’ voice – anger at the way her husband was discredited in court and blamed by defence lawyer Kevin Ryan for straying into his hunting partner’s firing zone; bitterness towards Lee for not accepting responsibility for William’s death.

Just as Aron’s shooting and the subsequent trial split apart two families and their small Hawke’s Bay community, the Lee-Gillies case evoked strong emotions. A hunter who wrote a letter to the newspaper denouncing the not-guilty verdict had a threatening message left on his answer -phone.

After initially supporting Lee, who came to her husband’s funeral, Bronwyn took out a non-association order after learning he’d

Brian returned to New Zealand but lives apart from his family in another part of the country. Lechelle, still at home with her mum, has faced her loss head-on, speaking out through the Mountain Safety Council to drill home the most basic hunting code of all: clearly identify your target.

“What would you rather take home – a bit of meat, a trophy or your friend?” she says. “I know I can’t change what happened but I can make sure Aron’s story gets heard. If people could just walk a day in our shoes before they went out into the bush and touched that trigger. All I want is to make sure every hunter comes home safe.”

Among the many people who contacted the Timms after Aron’s death was Ian Pur-chase, whose 22-year-old son Matthew had been

shot in the head while rabbit hunting near Putaruru only a few months earlier.

An agricultural exchange student from the UK, Matthew survived but was left perma-nently disabled. Danish tourist Bjarne Jensen, 48, defended a charge of carelessly using a firearm causing injury and was found not guilty at a high-court jury trial in Rotorua.

New Zealand law means the Purchases can’t sue for compensation to help towards their son’s ongoing medical bills. They don’t qualify for ACC either, because Matthew is back home with them in England.

Ian Purchase, who flew to New Zealand for the trial, told media outside the court he was shocked by the verdict. “It seems

Above left: Born into a family passionate about hunting, Aron Timms learnt to shoot as a boy. Above right: The Taradale team from the Kennels Gun Club. Aron is wearing the red cap; his father Brian is sitting at the far end on the left.

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and accepts his own hunting days are over. He describes what happened as “exception-ally irresponsible” and is an advocate of tougher sentences. While the judge who heard the case was highly critical of the lack of care taken by the hunter to identify his target, Ross wasn’t impressed by the sen-tence: a $4000 fine and $5000 reparation. “It’s a bit of a slap on the wrist, you know.”

A lifelong hunter, Ross once heard a group of young lads in a back-country hut talking about firing “sound shots” – where you hear a sound in the bush and shoot at it. “I found out where they were going hunting that morning and we went off in the opposite direction.”

He’d like to see youngsters taken down to the firing range by police before they’re given a firearms licence and wouldn’t dream of going out in the roar, when the bellowing stag you’re stalking can turn out to be an-other hunter roaring right back at you.

“All these Rambos come down from Auck-land to Taupo and scare the wits out of you,” he says. “Honestly, for every one [person]shot and hit there must be a dozen near-misses when a bullet goes zinging by.”

There’s an old Forest Service slogan from the 1960s: “Better No Meat than No Mate”. In an analysis of 33 deer-hunting deaths from 1979 to 2002, “To Hunt and

Return”, target identification was a factor in two-thirds of them. Most were experienced hunters and 58 per cent of all fatal shootings involved mates who’d become separated and lost sight of each other.

The NZ Deerstalkers Association has stopped short of making high-visibility clothing mandatory but recommends cloth-ing that contrasts with the conditions (deer are colour blind so they don’t get spooked). At best, that offers limited protection. Blaze orange – the favoured colour – has been mistaken for the reddish tinge of a sika deer in certain types of bush.

“At the end of the day, the sole responsibil-ity for taking the shot is the guy with his finger on the trigger,” says Mike Spray, who runs the Mountain Safety Council’s firearms and hunter training programme. “You’ve got to assume any shape, colour, movement

Pig hunter Scott Candy (front) and his 15-year-old son Dean use GPS transmitters to track their hunting dogs through the bush.

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“It’s hard to try and find purpose in life… to find things that are worthwhile. I’ve shut myself away quite a bit.”

And every time he hears about another shooting, another death, it’s anger he feels more than anything. “I never thought it would happen to me; I always thought I made sure [of the target]. And that’s what worries me about other hunters. They never think it will happen to them – and it should never happen if every rule is applied.

“In my mind, that was a deer looking at me. Every day I think about it and I still can’t see anything different. There was not even a thought that it wasn’t or I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger. But you’ve got to be 100 per cent sure you can see the whole animal because if you get it wrong, the consequences are huge. It’s that simple.”

or sound is human, until proven other wise.”In the past five years, the number of fire-

arms licences being issued to first-time ap-plicants has doubled to 10,000 a year. Game has proliferated since the decline of the helicopter deer-recovery industry (despite complaints about the ravages caused by 1080 drops) and TV programmes such as Hunger for the Wild have given new street-cred to the concept of hunting for “free-range” food.

A proposal to establish a New Zealand Game Animal Council, to represent the in-terests of game-hunting sectors and manage resources, is before the Minister of Conser-vation. One recommendation is a registra-tion programme with training modules on ethics and safety; “rewards” for hunters who come on board might include extra points for the oversubscribed wapiti ballot.

Most in the hunting community, including Mike Spray, favour education over regulation and doubt whether stiffer charges would cut the casualty rate. The consequences, they say, are already penalty enough.

Jim Mattler still has 100 hours of com-

He can see it now: the eye of the stag looking straight at him through the bush, the soft curve of its ear. Again and again he’s replayed it over in his mind and

always he sees exactly the same thing.But when Dave Alker’s shotgun

cracked the mid-autumn morning, the stag he’d been stalking – the stag he was sure he had locked in his sights – broke cover off to one side and crashed away through the scrub.

Outsmarted, the experienced bushman knew he’d hit something; probably a hind or a spiker hanging around the edge. “It wasn’t until I walked up there that I knew what had happened. It was Hamish.”

That April, in 2003, was a black month in the bush, as the hunter became the hunted.

In the North Island, three men were shot and killed in as many weeks at the height of “the roar”, the peak deer-stalking season when rutting stags call for a mate.

Only nine days after the death of 26-year-old Hamish Harland near Turangi, a father of two was shot in the head in the Kaimanawa Ranges after being mistaken for a deer. Another hunter was killed in the Ureweras, and a man was hospitalised after being struck

A Lifetime of Regret Taumarunui deerstalker Dave Alker was sentenced to nine months in jail for the death of a young hunting friend. Seven years later, he’s still doing time.

by a bullet while hunting in Fiordland.In the moment that it took him to

pull the trigger, the world closed in on Alker. He pleaded guilty to carelessly using a firearm causing death and served half of a nine-month sentence – two months in Waikeria Prison then the rest on home detention. He welcomed the jail time. “I had to pay somehow. It doesn’t change anything but if I hadn’t gone in, it wouldn’t have felt right.”

Of course, when he came out it still wasn’t over. Not for the Harland family and not for Alker. A man who’d lived for the outdoors since his father took him shooting as a boy, he moved away from his home near Owhango because he couldn’t stand looking at the bush every day or hearing the stags roar.

Now 53, he hasn’t hunted with a gun since, although over the past year or so

he’s started walking out with his two sons, who are both in their early 20s. “They went through it as much as I did back then,” he says. “I don’t want to miss out on time with my boys because I cocked up. It’s not their fault.”

These days he works for the council, clearing noxious weeds and keeping his head down. Harland’s mother wants nothing to do with him and he doesn’t blame her. Unlike other hunters charged with fatal shootings who’ve fought their cases in court, Alker has never ducked accountability for her son’s death. Because when you strip away everything else – the trickery of the light, the excitement of the hunt, his certainty that Harland was nowhere near his line of fire – he failed to correctly identify his target.

“It’s been pretty rough; Hamish and I were good mates,” he says.

munity work to go for shooting a mate in January on a night hunting trip in the Ma-maku Forest (another case of an LED light being mistaken for the eye of a deer).

The bullet just missed his friend’s spine. Although the man holds no hard feelings and has made a full recovery, Mattler, 52, can’t forgive himself. He’s quit hunting for good and says his life has done a complete u-turn since that “horrible hell of a night”.

Supported by his two brothers, Mattler pleaded guilty to carelessly discharging a firearm causing bodily injury. In court, Judge Chris McGuire warned hunters to ensure what they were shooting at was an animal, not another hunter. “I accept without reservation your remorse and the agony you feel for shooting your best friend.”

It’s a moment Mattler relives every day. “I don’t know how long it will take me to get over that thing. I thought I’d killed him. I can’t even see the guy any more because I don’t know how to face him.

“It takes a day and a night for the world to go round but just a split-second to go on its arse and turn everything upside down.” +Si

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Left: The coroner’s report into Aron Timm’s death called for hunters to be held more accountable for accidental shootings.

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where there were no marked trails, a person walking just a few metres ahead could dissolve into the bush without warning and simply disappear.

Research shows Maori are rarely involved in shooting accidents, perhaps because hunting has traditionally been about feeding the whanau and less about who claims the kill – taking away the competitive edge that can cloud good judgment.

The closest Morrison has ever come to losing a hunting mate was when one of the crew slipped off a bluff and was lucky to escape without serious injury. For all the bravado and easy camaraderie, making it home is what matters, even if you turn up empty-handed.

“Every hunter is like a brother; it affects the whole community when there’s an accident. But in the roar, you get a lot of part-timers who haven’t seen a deer for 10 months. That’s what’s in their mind. And it’s their mind that tells them what they see.” +

cooked it and made me eat it,” he says. “You use it, or you leave it alone.”

It’s a typical slice of laconic storytelling from Morrison, who fronts Maori Television’s hit show, Hunting Aotearoa, now filming its seventh season, with more than 100 episodes already gone to air. A family affair, the team includes his younger brother, Richard, as the soundman.

Sticking pigs and gutting deer might be a touch too realistic for the squeamish sensibilities of mainstream TV, but the weekly half-hour programme has become part of the rural community for Maori

You can bet Howie Morrison Jnr learnt a fair bit at the knee of his famous father. A certain charm. A love of music (he has his own three-man “quartet”). A weakness for talking

in puns. “Don’t let them give you any stick,” he grins – holding out a stick.

But one of the lessons he’s never forgotten was when Sir Howard, a crack shot who culled thousands of deer in his professional hunting days, caught his eldest son shooting birds with an air rifle.

“He picked one up, put it in the pot,

Brotherhood of Men A resurgence in the popularity of hunting among a new generation is behind one of Maori Television’s highest-rating shows.

and Pakeha alike and given it voice.“Churrr this show is the hits,” writes a

fan on the Hunting Aotearoa blog. “Love the big-ass pigs and the deer. If u keen for a hunt just call a brotha up and it’s on.”

On the day Sir Howard would have celebrated his 75th birthday, North & South joined the film crew on location, pig-hunting on a farm west of Whangarei with a pint-sized stowaway along for the ride.

Hunting Aotearoa is eight-year-old Bayden Hay’s favourite show, ritually recorded every Thursday night to watch before school on Friday. Dwarfed by Morrison and his men, he was a boy among heroes as they gathered outside a bakery to throw down a few pies for breakfast.

Freckle-faced, with a wispy mullet straggling out of his camo-print beanie, Bayden has been duck shooting since he was five and cut class to come on the hunt. “You learn more in the bush than you do at school,” said his dad, Justin, who runs an upholstery business in Whangarei. “And everyone calls me Fred.”

A few hours later, Bayden had streaks of mud on his face and a dead pig hooked across his shoulders – sharp, white teeth protruding from its hairy snout, which slapped up and down on his shoulder as he struggled manfully under its weight.

The damage caused to spring growth by rooting snouts meant open season had been declared on wild pigs ravaging the farm’s green pasture.

None of the three squealers caught on this particular day came close to making the “two-ton club”, for trophy porkers weighing more than 200 pounds. But after a five-hour slog through hail, thunder, mud swamps and the sharp bite of electric fences, there was bacon for the table and another show in the can.

“Today we got enough to feed three families for the next three weeks,” said Morrison, handing round some hunting tucker – cold baked beans slugged straight from a jagged tin. “And all it’s cost is a bit of walkin’, talkin’ and $10 of diesel.”

Reeking with mud and gore, one of the pig dogs loped over for a rub. Zak and Diesel, Hay’s pair of dogs, wear GPS collars so they can be tracked for the chase. By the end of the day, the city slickers among these hardened hunters wished we’d been wearing them too. In the dense undergrowth,

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Hunting Aotearoa presenter Howie Morrison Jnr.

Above and top: Eight-year-old Bayden Hay heads for home after a day out pig hunting in Northland with his dad Justin (wearing the blue beanie).