Wapiti hunting as it is done.

This story http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10636781 about NZ wapiti hunters finding a body fascinates me.  I can imagine Mitre Peak is not exactly suburban but you'd suspect they would have attached a little more priority to their find!

I can just imagine the Monty Python sketch:

"Oh look there's a body here Bruce." 
"So there is. It's a dead person Jim"
"Look a Wapiti: go get it Eric"  

FX Bang, bang. 

Holds up card marked 'Two weeks later. '

"Shit Eric, we're out of beer."
"So we are.  You'd better get some more.  Oh, report that body to the cops could you?  The police station's next door to the Pub." 
"By the way, there's another Wapiti"

FX Bang bang!
FX Fade to (all) black

I have got a couple of email comments on the story from friends of a Kiwi persuasion.  They are reproduced anonymously here:
(1) Very remote area--wapiti hunters are about right.  Finds of long-missing people, planes, etc. are not unusual.   Like the great outback--it is possible for people simply to disappear in Fiordland.

(2) It is all a matter of what is important and has priority in life. I have a friend who is a cop for the NZ police who goes off to Fiordland every year to shoot large feral animals. I can imagine that, having spent a fortune to be flown in, he would not waste his money on going back to report something as mundane as a body!!

In a similar vein of bizarrity this tale from the UK:

• TWO British women who allegedly tried to smuggle a dead relative onto a flight out of England "Weekend at Bernie's"-style have been arrested.
• Kurt Willi Jarant, 91, was in a wheelchair and wearing sunglasses as his widow and her daughter attempted to check him in at Liverpool John Lennon Airport, northwest England.
• Airport staff helped the elderly man, who suffered from Alzheimer's, out of a taxi into the wheelchair when he arrived for his flight.  But officials became suspicious and took his pulse, discovering he had passed away.
• Police then detained his widow Gitta Jarant, and her daughter, Anke Anusic, at the airport on suspicion of having failed to give notification of death. They have been released on bail.
• The pair, who live in Oldham, northwest England, denied he was dead when they brought him from their home to take the flight to Germany.
• A police doctor said he had been dead for more than 24 hours, according to Ms Anusic, but she fiercely denied this.  "They would think that for 24 hours we would carry a dead person?" the 41-year-old told the BBC.  "This is ridiculous. He was moving, he was breathing."
• The pair said they thought that with his eyes closed the elderly man was asleep. "He was alive. He was pale but he wasn't dead," Ms Anusic added.  Gitta Jarant, 66, told the broadcaster her husband, whom she called Willi, was "the best man in the world."
• "Everyone loved him and everyone was in shock about his death," she said."I loved my Willi."
• "So many people had seen him in the previous 24 hours. We had checked his temperature and checked his wellbeing. The accusations are wrong," Ms Anusic said.