KEY POINTS:
It was 6.00am when we headed out of Dunedin last weekend.
There were four badly dressed blokes in a car, some collapsible chairs, camouflage equipment, three guns, boxes of ammo and a packet of chocolate afghans.
Through the half light we went north, past Waikouati and its magnificent,
condemned racecourse grandstand, past Flag Swamp primary school, into Palmerston (south), a town famous only for almost indigestible mutton pies.
Left into heartland, where long straight roads are free of tarseal, to a pond nestled in the foothills of the Kakanuis.
The mai mai were smaller than expected, just a bit of brushstick wrapped around two stakes. No roof, no table, no just in the corner for tea and coffee.
My presence was a mystery, as I have a long-held hatred of firearms and, as a cricketer with delusions of grandeur but no skills to match, a deep respect for ducks.
No duck has, or ever will, pass through these lips, whether it be Peking, a l'orange, crispy or canard a la Rouennaise. So there is no killing to survive excuse.
No, this is pure sport, apparently.
The Leader is a man who was born in the wrong time and place. Had he been born in the early 19th century he would have acquired a Coonskin hat and headed down to Texas to shoot some varmits and Mexicans.
In Otago he has to busy himself with pigs, deer and ducks, and teaching PE in his spare time. Judging by the pre-shoot lecture about how to avoid shooting each other, it was with some trepidation that he left a pharmacist and a sports hack in one mai mai to wait for a chance to kill.
He needn't have worried, for a long time the only attack was launched on the packet of afghans. Magpies cawed and swallows buzzed the pond with low-altitude fly-bys, but the ducks defiantly abstained.
Absurd attempts at deception are attempted. A 'Robo-Duck' is launched (surely ducks aren't that dumb?) and we all have a turn on the duck caller but end up doing a better impression of the bagpipe solo in AC/DC's A Long Way to the Top than we do of imitating a duck.
The temperature had threatened to hit zero degrees celsius when three finally landed in front of the short-sighted accountant's mai mai at the other end of the pond.
The Leader, in his waders, cut a track through the trees to alert him. He stood, they took off, he shot. One dropped, the other two flew across the front of our mai mai.
The pharmacist fired and missed. The hack fired and... hit.
It was like a computer game, where the victim quite literally just falls out of the sky and goes splat in the pond. There's a brief feeling of euphoria.
After a while it's obvious no ducks are coming back anytime soon. The bounty is still in the pond, bobbing up and down pathetically, dead as a dodo.
That euphoric feeling was ephemeral, replaced by a gut-churning guilt that couldn't be alleviated by a third afghan.
The last thing I felt like was a 'winner'. So I asked myself: Is it sport?
After all, one side has all the weapons and everything stacked in their favour while the other side is interested only in damage limitation.
In that respect it must be sport because it's virtually identical to the increasingly irrelevant June rugby 'tests' then.
The only difference is that rather than the gunman, the one's feeling guilty should be the New Zealand Rugby Union, other national rugby bodies, and most particularly, the spineless International Rugby Board.
Unless something is done quickly those June tests should go the way of the dodo, and that unfortunate duck.
