ImBillT
Well-known member
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2018
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First shot was 670yds and the second shot 30yds? You talking about the same animal?
First three shots were at 670yds. The elk were on private land heading toward public. I was on a hillside and there were a lot of trees between him and myself that would have obstructed my view if I came down. I was trying figure a good way if closing the gap. It was day three of a five day hunt and supposed to rain for days four and five. I was quite a few miles down dirt and figured I would be limited to places that could be accessed from pavement for the next two days. It had been dead calm and it suddenly started hailing. The herd of elk went from browsing casually and dispersed to a tight group behaving a bit nervously. Then the cows just started jumping the fence onto public in a bit of a wave and heading to cover. Considering the weather conditions at the moment and in forecast I decided it was a shoot now or forever hold your tag situation. It got down to two cows and the bull still waiting to jump and the bull looked at them like “well I’m done waiting on you two” so he jumped fence to public and stopped to look back at them. I figured they were at 400-500yds and I knew my drop at 500yds was 30”. I held 8” over the back and fired. Then top of the antlers and fired again. That time I saw dirt kick up behind his back foot, so I quickly about two feet over the antlers and foot in front of his nose and fired again. As soon as I trigger broke I though “nooooo, I should have gone way more than a foot in front!” He reacted to being hit though. At this point the rain made my scope so blurry I couldn’t see well enough for a fourth shot before he made it to cover. I cleaned my scope lenses, closed my scope caps, and headed toward a different hill that would give me a better view of where they had disappeared. Sure enough I got back on the herd and circled downwind expecting him to either be down, or trailing the cows. There he was at 30yds. He was down but his head was up so I put one on the shoulder. The first hit(third shot) had been a gut shot and it exited. Like I said it had been dead calm. Between the excitement of it and being on the off side of the hill I hadn’t noticed that the wind picked up. It must have been blowing pretty hard as a 10mph crosswind at 670yds is only blowing me about 17”. Perhaps the bullet was hitting the pea sized hail. I don’t know. Had I not been able to see the impact of the second shot, I wouldn’t have hit him with the third. I don’t know what the firs bullet did to his insides because I did he gutless method, but the second bullet was rather devastating. I was also very blessed by God with a ceasing of the rain from that point until we finished hauling him the truck that morning. It started raining about the time we hit pavement and continued to do so for the entire day.
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