The last of the Fiordland Mohicans

Sunday, 28 September 2025

The incredible story of three brothers, Gary, Mark, and Kim Hollows, and how they flew and shot their way into Fiordland legend, has never been told. Now, a new book details the brothers’ adrenaline-infused achievements, their disasters, and the most unimaginable tragedies. Mike White reports.

Kim Hollows remembers losing control of the helicopter as the faulty tail rotor sheared off, and knowing all he could do was hang on.

Craig Feaver, on board with Hollows shooting deer, remembers the sudden violent shuddering, “then everything just blew apart.

“We were cartwheeling end over end, but spinning at the same time. “And I remember thinking, ‘Shit, this is going to hurt’.”

Mid-winter, mid-morning, hurtling down Fiordland’s Seaforth River towards Dusky Sound, the helicopter smashed into rocks mid-stream.

Hollows came to, levered himself up in waist-deep water, realised his arm was broken, and then noticed Feaver trapped under the wrecked fuselage.

With his one good arm, Hollows hauled Feaver’s head above the surface. “And I thought, he’s dead, he’s dead.”

Seconds later, Feaver gasped.

Feaver had broken his back, both ankles, and his sternum, and kept slipping in and out of consciousness as the day turned foul and snow began to fall.

Unable to move, and beginning to suffer hypothermia, Feaver told Hollows to save himself. But Hollows wouldn’t dream of it, and stayed in the water, cradling Feaver’s head, keeping him from drowning.

By mid-afternoon, Feaver was succumbing to the cold. “I saw the bright white lights.”

Hollows realised only two things could save them: The faint transmission from their chopper’s emergency beacon; and the chance one of his brothers would realise they were missing, and somehow find them in a million miles of Fiordland forest.

From beach to bush

The story of Kim, Mark, and Gary Hollows, is part of Fiordland lore now.

Much of it revolves around the helicopters the three piloted, and the deer they shot and captured.

But their story, told by Queenstown author Peta Carey in her new book The Hollows Boys, goes far beyond yarns of aerial heroics, and cowboys in the skies.

It was a book that took Carey years to wrangle and write. And some of the stories are so brutal, so sad, you have to wonder how anyone was ever able to speak of them.

The boys grew up on Kawau Island, hunting wallabies and possums and deer as soon as they could level a rifle.

One by one, they gravitated to Te Anau, and the nascent deer industry of the 1970s.

Kim was just 12 when he first visited his older brothers, and was dropped into the mountains with a rifle.

At 14 he’d quit school and was shooting deer from helicopters.

At 17 he was flying them.

By then he’d already survived his first chopper crash: Sixty stitches, concussion, intensive care. “I’d ruptured my guts.”

Crashes were just part of the territory as pilots pushed limits chasing deer worth thousands on the live market. Trees were clipped, chains snagged rotors, engines failed, wires were flown into, exhausted pilots fell asleep.

One time in the Hollyford, Kim impaled his chopper on a tree, his shooter with a broken leg and ribs on one side, him on the other with a fractured ankle. When Kim unclipped himself he fell metres to the ground and broke his back.

Doctors insisted he’d be immobilised for six months. Unimpressed with this prognosis, Kim checked himself out of hospital, and was driven home by car, lying across the back seat with his feet out the window.

Within two months, he was back flying.

But for every near miss, there was a pilot who didn’t make it. For every scrape they would later laugh off, there was someone left paralysed, and a family left penniless.

“I reckon I’ve had a look through the pearly gates,” says Craig Feaver.

Beyond bravado, the loss of mates and colleagues inevitably took its toll, and Feaver got sick of going to funerals.

“Mentally, you’re not really sure how to deal with it. The way I look at it, there are a few things I put in a box, close the lid, and don’t dare open.”

But sometimes they escape, and return to torment you.

Ask Mark Hollows.

The cruellest blow

In September 1989, Mark Hollows was piloting a chopper, with his older brother Gary shooting deer from it in Fiordland’s remote Cameron Mountains.

It was Friday afternoon, they were already planning to hit the pub that night, they were low on fuel, and in a hurry.

As Gary, 50, leapt out to deal with four deer he’d shot, the helicopter rocked backwards dangerously, and Mark instinctively throttled up and tried to fly off the slope.

Hearing the power come on, Gary stood up, and was struck in the head by the main rotor.

Mark sat with his brother’s body for six hours until rescuers found them.

By then, he’d used up nearly all his ammunition - shooting kea to keep them away from Gary.

“It was my fault. I’ve never denied it. Never,” says Mark.

It wasn’t, says Carey. Many things might have averted it, but in the end, it was just a horrible accident.

But Carey knows how much of a burden Mark still carries. How he can never unsee what he witnessed, any more than he can turn the clock back and undo what happened.

Mark and Kim had to go and tell their mother Gary had been killed.

“You just can’t describe it,” remembers Kim. “She howled from the bottom of her soul.”

A losing game

Kim bears his burdens too. “I ruined so many lives.”

Carey, who first met Kim when she was 18 and working at a Hollyford Track lodge, doesn’t see it like that. But she knows who Kim is talking about.

Janey Blair was Kim’s partner and a pilot for his helicopter company.

“Watch those wires,” were the last words Kim said to Janey as she prepared to take four American tourists on a sightseeing flight across Lake Manapouri in 2000. He was referring to the transmission lines stretching from the West Arm power station.

Janey hit them. Everyone was killed.

Despite his warning, Kim blamed himself for what happened. He hid under his bed for weeks, until rescued by a mate.

Kim has gone on to become a successful Te Anau businessman beyond his helicopter company, developing property, building a cinema and bar, bankrolling a film, Ata Whenua, Shadowland, that celebrates his beloved Fiordland.

But solace seems unattainable, when chased by the memories of the friends and family he’s lost.

Happiness is impossible, he says. “Peace of mind is folly.”

Rolling the dice

“I think that’s incredibly sad,” says Carey, who admits it was difficult getting inside Kim’s head at times.

But she understands how everyone involved with helicopters and deer in those days is marked in some way by the trauma of loss.

“A lot of pilots or hunters say, ‘Oh, we just went and had a few beers and got over it.’

“I’m not sure they all did. And certainly Mark didn’t. And Kim hasn’t … They carry the load of the deaths with them.”

Carey, who has written extensively about Fiordland, didn’t want her book to be simply tales of daredevils and derring-do.

“It’s about so many issues that affect us all - the big one being luck. The roll of the dice. Wondering why you’re the one who survived and somebody else didn’t.

“How do we process that? We don’t, to some degree. We just live with it … We just carry on. Peace of mind is then, ‘folly’. Or we see it in the lines on our faces.”

And are the ones left behind really the lucky ones, Carey wonders, with ghosts as constant companions?

Carey is amazed Kim, now 64, survived everything.

“Astonishing. Absolutely astonishing.”

Such was the adventure, and addiction to the adrenaline of the job, pilots and shooters convinced themselves they were bulletproof, that cataclysm would never happen to them, in the same way young soldiers heading to war never imagine they’ll be the one to die.

But the repeated rub of reality eventually reveals mortality, and most surviving pilots know luck played an enormous part.

Not Kim Hollows, though. He still clings to the maxim you make your own luck.

“I think Mark knows he’s not invincible,” says Carey. “But I’m pretty sure Kim still has an element of that in him.”

A dying breed

The rush of the Seaforth River and the chill of its waters were the only constants as Kim Hollows and Craig Feaver tried to survive beside the debris of their helicopter that day in 1988.

But as night arrived, so did the regular and rapid beat of another helicopter.

It was Mark Hollows who spotted them in the river, sitting beside legendary pilot Richard “Hannibal” Hayes, now knighted for his helicopter work.

Within minutes Hayes had rested one skid on a rock, Feaver and Hollows were loaded in, the heaters turned up full blast, and they were on their way to hospital.

Remembering it now, Hayes is as pragmatic as he is prosaic. “I went to look for a friend. And I found him.”

Kim ordered a doctor to cut the cast off his broken arm after two weeks, and went back to flying, with his arm in a sling.

Feaver managed to walk again, but took months to recover. In that time, with no ACC, he went broke and lost his house.

But he knows he’s one of the lucky ones.

“I’ve never thanked Kim, really. Probably be good to do that. If it wasn’t for Kim, I wouldn’t be here.”

Kim, 64, and Mark, 71, are still flying commercially.

They live three minutes’ walk from each other above Lake Te Anau.

Their relationship is complicated. Unique, Carey says, threaded with competition, and compassion for each other.

One of Kim’s children says, “They’re like best friends, but also not.”

Only the Fiordland hunters truly understand the exhilaration of their work, the beauty of the country, how close they flew to peril and perishing at any moment, and the pits of their grief. As one pilot put it: “We don’t live in a normal world.”

“Mark and I are the last of the Mohicans,” says Kim, “the last ones to have made a living out of it.

“I’ll do it till the day I die.”

The Hollows Boys, by Peta Carey (Potton & Burton, $39.99) is released on October 1.

Peta Carey will be appearing at the Queenstown Writers Festival on Friday October 31.