Chapter 175: Long Shot

Editor: nnpdad 21

Scratchy and itchy. That always goes well when mixed with hot and humid.

I laid in the long grass at the crest of a small hillock, and it was scratchy and itchy laying there in the grass. Lunch and my two favorite mules were picketed just below me and out of sight. I’d ridden one of the mules out here to keep Lunch fresh and ready to run; when the buffalo broke I’d need all of Lunch’s speed and stamina to complete the hunt. It wasn’t a true hill or anything, but it was a large enough roll in the land to hide the horses and give me a good line of sight.

I was the lucky one: I had the long ranged rifle from the future and I was going to start the shooting from six hundred yards out. Everyone else had to sneak up much closer and stay under cover until I gave the signal. The hope was that I could take multiple young bulls before the herd realized what was happening. At that range, there was a good chance that the herd wouldn’t realize what was happening for quite a bit and wouldn’t be spooked.

Pete was astonished when I showed him the range and accuracy of the AR-15. The Spencer was actually more powerful, but it was louder and slower. I could run through multiple targets in the same time that the Spencer might give you one or two. So I cracked off a few long range rounds for Pete, and once he’d gone down range to hear what it sounded like, it didn’t take him long to figure it all into his hunting plan; his practical intelligence was one of the things I liked best about him. I’d put a single round at that distance into a young beef bull we had decided to butcher, and that was enough to make him happy. It was decided that I could snipe at range until the herd reacted.

So we lay in wait.

We really didn’t want to take any cows if we didn’t have to. The sexual birth rate was roughly fifty-fifty and, since a single mature bull could service a hundred cows or more in a season, there were a lot of spare bulls for the harvesting. Pete had specified that we focus on the young bulls who were usually relegated to the outskirts of the herd to preserve the viability of the herd itself. One thing I did know was that you could safely snipe any herd without stampeding them, so long as each report was far enough away and was a quick kill shot. Unfortunately the AR-15 wasn’t up to making head shots on North America’s largest land mammal by weight; they had a skull on them that would stop everything but the heaviest of rounds. You had to make spine or heart shots, and that wasn’t necessarily easy.

Obviously, any animal which was merely wounded would run around and make a whole lot of noise to warn his herd mates. After that it would no longer become a turkey shoot but a live action stunt event for every creature involved. An angry bison, male or female, had no problem attacking a hunter and had killed plenty over the ages, so this wasn’t a place to make a mistake. Every single one of our hunters needed to be cognizant of the dangers involved; if a bison turned to engage you, running was your best option.