Hogg
New Member
Grizzly said:Used to? Why not now? North end of your state has some really good Elk hunting and those are, IMO, the absolute best eating game species.
I knew you were looking for a good story....
I was roughly 19 at the time, clearing ground squirrels off the dairy farmer's property adjacent to my friend's ranch in Valley Center. Over the years, we had shot the shit out of the ground squirrels and some were rather large, like the size of a woodchuck. Anyway, so we waited behind a large oak tree for the little bastards to come up out of the burrow, they call a lot and seem to come up out of the burrow at least a half dozen or so after the first one. So they broke, my friend shot one out of the whole and the balance scattered. I nailed a huge one on the run but shot high and caught it in the high back. It was trying to run for the burrow with its front legs and I had to run the damn thing down. Hitting it with the butt of my gun did no good since the pad absorbed most of the impulse so I tried stomping it with my boot and had to give it a good half dozen stomps until it stopped moving. I looked down at this poor thing and asked myself why the hell I had shot it anyway....I mean, yeah, they had problems with the cows getting stuck in the burrows and breaking their legs.....but I wasnt the dairy farmer.....and as I took one last look down at this poor lifeless little son of a bitch, I thought of my cat. That was the end of shooting anything with fur.
I continued hunting dove and quail but that ended soon thereafter.
The sporting clays thing and trap and skeet.....I just wasnt hitting well enough. I was lucky to shoot a 19 on the trap range and had about a 55-60% hit ratio on sporting clays. I sucked at skeet...I'm not very coordinated and couldnt hit much of anything...shot the house a few times trying to catch it early....I just sucked at it and gave up.
From "The Life and Times of Hogg"
