long range – No Off Season

My oldest son, Hank, was home for the holidays. The last morning of his visit, he shot a coyote off the patio and had bear sausage for breakfast—a Hardcore morning. He could hardly wait to get back to So Cal and tell his buddies and girlfriend about his morning. There was a reason they called him Hank “The Mountain Man” Titus in the Marine Corp!

This morning my youngest son, Ben, and I woke early for a bobcat hunt. Ben grabbed a box of Reeses Puff cereal for his breakfast. I suggested that we had some left over waffles he could heat up–a manly breakfast. No bear sausage in them but definitely more Hardcore than Reeses Puffs! After our manly breakfast we hit the road with CCR playing “Run Through the Jungle” on the stereo and a glow in the eastern sky. This was gonna be a good day.

I’ve taken two bobcats this season so we were trying to get Ben his first ‘cat of the year. Our first stop was a rim I had located during my deer hunt this Fall. The trail across the top was littered with ‘cat scat. It was the best bet we had to call in a bobcat for Ben.

The first stand was a blank but the rim is over a half mile long so I suggested a move down the rim and setup again. It’s a great rim with boulders strewn along the hillside below it—ideal habitat for a desert bobcat. We set up quartering one of the boulders. We set the Foxpro Fury and Jack Attack decoy 65 yards upwind in case a coyote came in and I started the Foxpro with my usual bobcat standby, Adult Cottontail. After a couple of minutes, I gradually increased the volume to almost max then backed it back down. Then at ten minutes I switched up to the Baby Cottontail sound. A couple of minutes later Ben says he’s got a ‘cat spotted. It’s coming towards us along the bottom of the rim but for some inexplicable reason (Who can figure cats?) it climbs to the top of the rim and comes down the top. As it slows, I call the range to Ben–220 yards, 215 yards…. I tell him he has a right to left wind then I correct it and tell him to hold zero wind. The wind is coming straight at us. The cat stops and Ben shoots but there is no sign of a hit. The cat flinches but doesn’t run off. Ben is cold and a little Bobcat Fever has set in. Now he doesn’t know what to do and the ‘cat moves further down the rim then stops with just its’ head and neck visible. It actually beds on top of the rim still close to 215 yards away.

Turns out Ben decided to hold a little wind after all and probably just parted the hair on the right side of the ‘cat. I see Ben’s head shaking and I think he’s shaking his head in disgust at having missed the shot. (Ben regularly hits rockchucks at over 1000 yards.) Then I realize he’s actually shaking that bad. (He later described it as convulsing!) Between the cold, Bobcat Fever and his nerves over having missed his first chance of the year on a bobcat, he’s having a hard time holding it together.

The cat remains bedded for several minutes. Ben wisely chooses not to try the head/neck shot under the circumstances so we wait on the cat to make a move. Thankfully the sun finally makes it over the ridge and the warmth starts to relieve some of Ben’s shakes. I switch the sound to Lucky Bird to try to make something happen and the cat gets up and starts moving further left and closer to us. It hesitates only once but not long enough for Ben to squeeze off a shot then disappears from view.

Now Ben thinks he’s blown it completely as the cat doesn’t show up for several minutes. I change sounds back to Adult Cottontail while Ben in his own words is “praying his head off” and I see what looks like the cat sitting on top of the rim at just over 100 yards. Ben confirms it is the cat and slowly moves his rifle almost 90 degrees to line up again. This time it all comes together and Ben looks like Tim Tebow pointing to heaven saying, “Thank you, Lord!”

Here are a couple of pictures of a very relieved young man and his first ‘cat of the season.

Relieved.

A well-timed prayer can really increase the faith of a young man!

Back at the truck we put on our victory song as we head out, CCR’s “Fortunate Son”. Yeah, it’s a good day….and it’s a good thing he had his waffles or he probably couldn’t have pulled it off!

Epilogue: The cat was a nice female. We estimated her to be around 22 pounds. The .17 Fireball did virtually no damage to the hide so we’re hoping she will bring enough to cover a chunk of the cost of a new range finder for Ben.

My nephew, Gus, took a rockchuck at 1264 yards.

Here’s the hero shot. (Red arrow shows the location of the rockchuck.)

And, now the story.

It’s getting close to the time our rockchucks will be going down for the year so I wanted to make a hunt this week. My youngest son, Ben, has held the family record for the longest rockchuck shot. He took one this spring at around 1100 yards. But, since Ben was out of town visiting his brother, I asked my nephew, Gus, if he wanted to go along. Gus was game so we headed out to try to get to a promising looking canyon I’d seen while hunting the previous week. The road was horrible but we eventually made it to within a short hike of the canyon.

The canyon was wider than I had imagined. It turned out to be a little over 800 yards across. We set up on the rim and began glassing. Eventually I spotted a couple of rockchucks beyond the far rim of the canyon standing up in the grass. They offered good shots but poor spotting. Gus ranged the area with his Leica 1200 at around 1250 yards. He only had ten rounds of ammo for his .308 with him. He told me that the previous two rounds from his .308 had scored on two sage rats and one bear and he wanted to keep his string going. I suggested that if that was the case, he probably wouldn’t want to start shooting at 1200 yard rockchucks. But, being the sensible young man that he is, he decided he might as well take a poke at them anyway.

Gus had not shot this particular load past 500 yards. The longest kill he’d made with the gun previously was around 550 yards on a prairie dog on our Wyoming trip two summers ago. With no drop chart we just discussed things and took a guess based on the drops for my rifle and adding more for the rainbow trajectory of the big 175 grain SMK. I told him to dial in 48 minutes of angle elevation and five MOA of wind. It didn’t instill a lot of confidence in him concerning our dope when I told him I hoped I could see his shot in the field of view of my spotting scope!

Gus shoots a Remington 700 SPS in a B&C stock (I think) with a Leupold Mark 4 4.5-14X scope. It definitely wasn’t too much magnification for the situation! He told me later that the horizontal crosshair was covering the whole ‘chuck. He dialed up, settled behind the rifle and squeezed off the shot. I was actually able to call the cold-bore shot. It was within about one minute on windage and several feet low. I told him to take one minute of wind out and come up another six MOA. That got us in the ball park on the next shot and he ended up with 58 1/4 minutes of elevation in the scope and three minutes of wind. For reference, that elevation equates to over 60 feet of holdover at that range!

The shots from that point on were all very close. He was close enough that he was scaring the rockchucks off with each shot. We’d then have to wait to find another in a position where I could spot the shot before he could loose another round. Long story short, on round number seven I saw no dust and the rockchuck took off like a scalded cat across the rocks and onto an angled face of a ledge where it launched itself into the air off a 40 foot cliff! We could see it wasn’t running correctly but didn’t know whether Gus had just hit it in the leg or what. He felt good enough about it to want to go check. I on the other hand wasn’t nearly as excited.

One challenge of long range shooting is the retrieval. This ‘chuck was a long ways away and across the canyon. Because of the rimrock, I didn’t know how far we’d have to go just to get to the bottom of the canyon which also happened to have a good sized stream running through it. But, being the good uncle I am, I went along. It took us over a half mile and an encounter with one very large rattle snake to get to a spot we could descend into the canyon. When we got to the stream, the run-off made it more like a small river and that was where the whole Good Uncle thing gave out!

Gus stripped down to his skivvies and carried his pants and shoes across the swollen creek. I didn’t know if he was going to be able to stay upright in the current but he’s shaped like Gumby so he doesn’t displace lot of water. He made it out, got dressed and headed up the other side of the canyon. I watched through the spotting scope as he approached the bottom of the bluff. A minute or so later he was holding up his 1264 yard rockchuck! The shot turned out to be a centermass hit with close to a one inch exit. The rockchuck was dead before he hit the ground.

Fording the creek — Gus refording the creek with his trophy

It took nearly three hours to get to the ‘chuck and make it back to our shooting location where we finished the “photo shoot”. Gus took several readings with his range finder. The average turned out to be 1264 yards.

Gus was really looking forward to rubbing his new record in his cousin’s face. Ben had pretty well stopped reaching out past about 1100 yards thinking his family record was safe. I can already envision Ben’s drive to move beyond 1264 yards. He’s got his work cut out for him but somehow I think he’s up to the task!

I never fired a shot but it was good day with a good kid and one exceptional shot.

Tag: long range

Of Waffles and Bobcats

A 1264 Yard Rockchuck