Country Living

As mentioned previously, we just acquired a house. It's in what may charitably be called "The Boonies". Doing work around the house the other day I heard one of the neighbors up the hill shooting what sounded like a .22.

Today I was cleaning up some stuff from painting and noticed a woodchuck out in the yard... it took me about three seconds to decide that (A) woodchucks are now fair game again, and (B) no one calls in complaints for shooting around here. It took me significantly longer to find a magazine and a few rounds of .22 for the Savage... perhaps 45 seconds.

I chambered a round, opened the bedroom window, and, carefully checking my backstop (shooting down, into dirt, good to go!), squeezed off one shot. Woody flipped, twitched, twitched some more, and expired.

Years of hunting actually made this a less-clean kill than I might have preferred. Animals are shot in the chest cavity - the desired intent to disrupt the function of the heart and/or lungs. It is not necessarily a *quick* kill (as anyone who has blood-trailed a deer will testify), but it is an *effective* kill. A neck or head shot is far more likely to produce an animal with a non-mortal wound, and no ethical hunter wants that.

At this range, particularly with a scoped .22, a headshot should have been quite possible... but the last time I shot this rifle, it was zeroed for 100yd, not the 25yd I normally use. So - instead of a one-inch vital area (head), I took the three-inch vital area, and that was that.

The carcass was heaved over the embankment into the weeds; fodder for the crows and 'yotes.

I finished cleaning up around the house and headed off to work - and there was no parade of police cars and SWAT vans arriving in the meantime.

Ah, gracious country living. :)