Jonty Drew meets Jim Wilson, Invictus gold medallist and newly qualified trained hunter.
There are evenings in this business that you know, even while they are happening, you will remember long after more successful ones have faded from memory. A Friday in August on a farm in Hampshire, with the thermometer sitting stubbornly at 32 degrees and not a breath of wind to be had, turned out to be one of them.
I had come to meet a man called Jim Wilson, and to get him onto his first deer.
Jim joined the army in 2008 as a combat engineer, and in 2011 he volunteered to be part of a search team in Afghanistan. 34 days into theatre, he stood on an improvised explosive device. He lost both his legs.
What followed was Headley Court, and the long, unglamorous business of learning to walk again. He began on stubbies, the short prosthetic legs used in the earliest stages of rehabilitation, and he gave himself something to aim at. He was to be married the following year, and he intended to stand at his own wedding on a full set of legs. He duly did. Two years after that, at the very first Invictus Games in 2014, he won a gold medal in powerlifting.
I mention all this not because Jim dwells on it, for he does not, but because it explains a great deal about the man who arrived that afternoon. There is a certain sort of person who responds to being told what he cannot do by going and doing it, and then actively looking about for something else. Jim is very much that sort of person.
Which brings us, by a route that will be familiar to many readers, to deer.
Jim had taken up long range target shooting with friends, discovered he was rather good at it, and it was those same friends who suggested that he should look at getting into deer stalking.
If you would like to get into deer stalking, an excellent place to begin is the Proficient Deer Stalker Certificate Level 1 (PDS1) via the Shooting & Hunting Academy. Follow this link to find out more and get started: Proficient Deer Stalking Course - PDS1
And so, over the past few months, Jim took the PDS1.
The theory he worked through at home, at his own pace, by way of the Academy's online platform, with no classroom to travel to and no weekend to be surrendered. That mattered to him practically, as it does to a great many candidates, though he is quick to point out that the real value lay in the content rather than the convenience.
Then came the practical, and here I confess to a certain admiration. The standing shot from uneven ground is the element that catches out more candidates than any other. Jim took it with his prosthetic legs, and he passed it on exactly the same criteria as everybody else, assessed in the ordinary way by an Approved Verifier. He now holds Trained Hunter status, a nationally recognised qualification accredited by LANTRA and UK Rural Skills, and with it the foundation of his application for that Firearm Certificate.
Ask Jim about the barriers and you will get a rather bracing answer, which is that there are fewer of them than most people imagine.
Slopes and uneven going are what catch him out, and the remedy, he says, is usually a matter of equipment rather than sympathy. Different ground calls for different legs, and he will swap onto smaller ones when the terrain demands it. Beyond that it falls to the guide, whose job it has always been to accommodate whoever he happens to be taking out. Most ground can be worked with.
As for the evening itself, well, a young roebuck obliged us far sooner than the conditions deserved, stepping onto the farm track a couple of hundred yards ahead almost before we had settled into our stride. We could not shoot on the track, so we peeled round to the field side and waited him out while he drifted in and out of the hedgerow, entirely unimpressed by my efforts on the buttolo. In due course he made his mind up and slipped into a square of woodland so thick that following him in was never a serious proposition.
We worked along the outside of it instead, picked him up again through the thermal, and had just settled onto the sticks at sixty metres when every telephone between us went off at once with a national wildfire warning. The buck, quite reasonably, wanted nothing further to do with us.
So, Jim went home without his first deer, which is stalking for you, and he was entirely stoic about it, which will surprise nobody who has read this far. He will be back with us before long, in better conditions, and we shall put that right.
The Shooting & Hunting Academy offers a 20% discount on the PDS1 to anyone who has served in the armed forces or the emergency services.
And if you have a physical disability and have looked at deer stalking from a distance and concluded that it is not for you, do get in touch with the County Deer Stalking and let us talk it through. As Jim will happily tell you, the answer tends to be a good deal simpler than you had feared.
Watch the full video HERE: INVICTUS GOLD to Deer Stalking | Jim Wilson takes on a New Challenge
Interested in becoming a trained hunter? Follow this link to find out more: Proficient Deer Stalking Course - PDS1
