Argentina Red Stag Hunting: Stalking the Roar

Evening settled slowly across the old burn. Stark trunks, naked and scorched, stood in high relief against the mixed green of fresh growth and golden grass. From the shadowed thicket ahead came a guttural growl—half brown bear and half leopard. It was the legendary roar of a red stag.

For a mountain boy raised in the Rocky Mountains, where the shimmering yellow leaves of quaking aspen and the whistle of bugling elk signal the best time of year, this was different. March—early autumn in the La Pampa province of Argentina—was hot. The landscape was flat. Doves flew in droves across open fields, but the red stags preferred dense thickets where it was hard to see and harder to stalk.

Three inches of rain had come thundering through the day we’d arrived, and hunting the usually productive water sources was futile. The unseasonal heat kept the red deer shaded up and quiet most of the day, even though the roar—or rut, as we know it—was in full swing.

So, we laced up our quietest boots and went amongst ’em.

Cows Aplenty

The Argentinian gauchos guiding us called female red deer cows, rather than hinds as they’re termed in Europe. And cows aplenty there were. Enough so that it proved difficult to still-hunt past and through them and see the stags before they saw us. Usually, we spooked the harem. Sometimes, we caught a glimpse of a mature stag trailing the trotting cows as they vanished like smoke into the thickets.

This hunt had fallen casualty to the Covid pandemic and been postponed for three years. Benelli’s Tim Joseph and Media Direct’s Mark Sidelinger were my hosts. They, my fellow writers and I were all equipped with Benelli’s racy-looking, slick-shooting, bolt-action Lupo BE.S.T rifle. It’s clad in fine AA-grade walnut and combines space-age engineering with classic looks.

For mid-afternoon dove shoots, we had Benelli’s black 20-gauge Ethos Cordoba shotguns.

We anticipated hunting edge cover along farm fields and forest country for red stag, blackbuck and wild boar. Whizzing along little-traveled back roads, two long days after leaving the U.S. and enduring endless waits and bureaucratic delays in Argentinian airports, I thought, “This looks as good as I imagined it!”

Argentina

To a hunter’s ears, the country is evocative of adventure. It’s a vast land, divided into 23 provinces. Patagonia is a cross-province region well-known in the worlds of adventuring, backpacking and fishing. It’s a scenic, mountainous area that runs through Argentina, and has very good free-range big game hunting.

The province of Cordoba is similarly known, primarily for its superlative bird hunting. I’ve been there, and the doves were so many they darkened the afternoon skies. Unlike Patagonia, Cordoba is flat or gently rolling and somewhat unremarkable except for its best-in-class bird hunting and luxury hunting lodges.

La Pampa, too, is flat, at least where we’d be hunting. We were headed into the northern panhandle area, smack dab in the middle of Argentina. The province is worthy of note for this fact: When red deer were introduced to Argentina in 1909, it was the Caldén hills in La Pampa where they took root.

A cousin to our Rocky Mountain elk, red deer are a wonderful, widely distributed species. Originating in Europe and Great Britain, they have been introduced into and now inhabit South America, New Zealand, Australia and even northern Africa. Small populations exist in fenced reserves in North America and Canada.

Roar

In size, red deer are slightly smaller than elk. A big stag will tip the scales at 500 to 600 pounds and stands about four feet high at the shoulder. Hinds, or cows as the Argentinians say, are significantly smaller.

Red deer rutting vocalizations are much different from elk. Rather than a high-pitched, whistle-sounding “bugle”, red stags roar. Biologists believe the difference evolved to match the habitat: High-pitched elk bugles reach far across open plains country and mountain canyons, while deep, throaty red stag roars more effectively penetrate dense, humid forest habitat.

Antlers, too, differ. Not much at the base, where two large brow tines typically jut forward, or the midsection of the main beam, where the third point emerges. Above that, rather than a primary beam with a tall “sword” fourth tine shooting straight up and the fifth tine and main beam creating a “whale tail” like a big 6x6 bull elk, a classic 6x6 red stag’s antlers create a crown, from which three points emerge from a single point on the main beam.

In areas with prime habitat, little pressure, a bit of genetic management and supplemental feeding, red stag antlers can reach truly epic proportions. Mass becomes stupendous, and the upper portions of the antlers branch into many non-typical points and palmation that appear nearly prehistoric. However, you don’t see that level of antler development in free-range areas.

Doves and a Diversion

Our lodge was quaint, homey and perfect. Red stag racks and shed antlers adorned the walls, and thick-haired wild boar skins warmed the cool tile floors. Doves flew in scattered flocks, not like Cordoba, but still in greater numbers than you’ll see on the best day of dove hunting in the finest areas in North America.

Post-storm red morning skies greeted us on our first day of hunting. Two writers went after stag; the other four of us staged up for doves a half-mile from the lodge. Flight action was steady if not overwhelming. I went through 500 rounds of pungent-smelling Argentinian shotshells before we broke for lunch.

Two fresh stag racks in the yard greeted us as we returned. Clearly, luck had been with the other two hunters that morning. One was a beautiful bull; shapely, many-tined and more impressive than I’d dared dream of shooting.

Incredibly, the other dwarfed it. It wasn’t mutant-huge like some of the high-fence New Zealand stags you see, but it had jaw-dropping mass and a wide, boxy shape with long beams and tall tines. It was much, much bigger than I’d expected to see in Argentina.

Game Management Systems

I glanced at Diana Rupp, the lucky hunter who’d tagged the bull that morning. I could feel my eyebrows puckering with doubt. “Free range?” I inquired.

“It’s fenced,” Diana responded, briefly. She was beaming, as she should be, but I could tell she’d had a surprise when they got out to begin hunting that morning.

This was news. It was news to the Benelli guys, too. Apparently, communication with the U.S.-based hunt booking agency had been less than optimal, and the hunting conditions had been misrepresented. There was nothing to be done at this point but make the most of it.

Thankfully, the outfitter, German Brandazza and his staff were top-notch, and the fenced area, although only a couple thousand acres, was properly wild. I pestered German (pronounced Herman, with the long-drawn, guttural “H” of the Germanic dialects) about the habitat and his game management system.

I quickly determined that this was not a put-and-take outfit—which was of foremost importance to me. I had no interest in shooting a pen-raised stag that had been released into the area a week or two before. German’s stags are born in the reserve and grow up wild and plenty spooky. All he does to manage the population is hunt the stags and introduce a female red deer with good genetics now and then.

Old-growth timber filled most of the big-game area, and, even better, it was virgin timber and thicket brush. As I understand it, a few decades ago Argentina made it illegal to clear any remaining virgin timber stands in order to protect what remained. Those timber stands are ideal for hunting operations such as German’s.

“Can the stags jump the fence?” I inquired. German glanced to the other side, nodding. “They can, and on occasion they do. However, the feed and habitat inside is better, and there are more females, so usually free-range stags from the outside jump in, rather than the other way around.” He chuckled. “This makes me happy."

The area is rife with pumas, which are basically the same as our cougars. At one point we bumped a flock of a dozen domestic sheep, and I asked why they were in the preserve.

“Puma,” came the brief response. “Puma prefer eating sheep to red deer. I keep some sheep here so the cats eat them and not the stags.”

German looked at me sideways. “You know how I told you the red deer rarely jump out of the fence? If a puma chases them, they will jump. I keep the sheep here so the red deer stay here, too.”

“Sacrificial sheep,” I mused.

My guide half-chuckled. “Yes.”

Stalking the Stags

For the next three days, German and I prowled those virgin timber stands and old-growth thickets each morning and evening. Understanding now that the stags were managed for size and age, and that the intensity of the roar was increasing, I decided to hold out for an old, heavy-antlered bull. That’s not to say we passed easy opportunities. My first morning out, we bumped a tremendous bull up close, so close his pungent smell filled my nostrils, but I couldn’t get a clear shot at anything but his neck.

Later, as I grasped just how big he’d been, I half wished I’d taken that neck shot. However, it would have felt too easy. Fenced area, 20 minutes into the first morning, on a whopper of a stag? I hadn’t yet earned it nor experienced any of the flavor of hunting red deer on their own turf in Argentina.

That was the only real opportunity I had for two and a half days—and oddly, I appreciated that. We were seeing enough mature stags—brief glimpses—to give me confidence that we’d close the deal eventually, and it was good to know that even though we were inside an enclosure, the hunt was no cake walk.

Most of the encounters occurred at 40 to 80 yards, which was about as far as we could see in the habitat. My Benelli Lupo rifle was chambered in .300 Win. Mag., a terrific cartridge with plenty of authority for elk-size game. I’d chosen to load it with Hornady Precision Hunter factory ammo topped with 200-grain ELD-X bullets. Groups at 100 yards were easily sub-MOA, and I’d worked the rifle and load out to 600 yards with gratifying results on steel targets the size of elk vitals.

A Smart Pivot

Crisper weather, and a landscape that had finally dried out, pushed us into a different area the third evening. A wildfire had swept through years before, opening swaths through the timber that enabled better visibility. Thicket clumps held cool shadows. Cool shadows held red deer.

German and I still-hunted through the knee-high yellow grass, stalking the roars, and wound our way between thickets so we could glass the far-reaching burned swaths. Distant roars became close. A trickle of cows pulled a bull from a timbered patch as the sun slanted low. He was huge, with wide-flung, heavy antlers—but one was broken off halfway up.

“Let’s find the bull that did that to him!” I whispered to German. He nodded, fully appreciative of my desire to find and harvest an old monarch of a stag. Few hunters, I was realizing, gave him a reason to hunt hard and be selective. He was enjoying the process as much as I was.

Whether they were satellite bulls or just hangers-on to the departed harem’s coattails, two more stags suddenly appeared from the shadows. Both appeared huge to my inexperienced eye. One had a big, boxy rack; the other was more compact but had tremendous mass.

Moment of Truth

German set up the shooting sticks and I slid the rifle onto them. The stags were walking through sparse brush 200 yards away, approaching a narrow alley I could shoot down. “The one in the rear,” whispered German. It was the big, box-antlered stag.

The shooting lane was too narrow, and the stags were walking too fast. By the time my crosshairs found the stag’s shoulder it was too late. I tried to force the shot and missed clean, right over his back.

Leaping forward a few paces, both stags hesitated in thick brush. We were able to watch their antlers long enough to determine the bull was unscathed. Suddenly, they vanished, one moving straight away and the other to our right.

Hustling in a wide-flung fishhook, we found another shooting lane, wider this time, and miraculously the massive-antlered stag walked slowly out at 220 yards. This time I was steady and ready, and the trigger broke with my crosshairs glued to the stag’s shoulder.

Culmination

Bright blood painted the golden grass. Fourteen paces from where he’d stood when I shot, the bull lay still, squarely shot through the vitals. The bullet had done its job perfectly.

After wringing my hand, German hustled off to call in reinforcements. Slow dust particles settled, catching the evening sun like dry fog. I sat, reluctant to break the enchantment of the Argentinian evening. For a time, it was just me, the sunset and the stag.

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