Was getting to leave for work this morning when I noticed one of the g-hogs was out in the yard early today. It's a medium sized youngster that 's been coming out almost daily usually early before noon, but never at 9:45am. I guess 55deg. is warm enough for this hungry growing g-hog.
Well this time he was extremely close to the house and feeding only about 15ft from the driveway. Total distance was 19-20yds so I figured what the hek, in the absense of my 350 getting tuned, let me try out my "new" tuned 36 I bought from Gene that shoots 7.9gr CPHP's @ 900fps. That should be enough to penetrate into the fuse box at 20yds.
I pushed the screen window up ever so slowly - took me for ever. Even though he kept looking up at the windows (he 's spotted me in the past and ran down the hole), he didn't see me. Within a couple of minutes I was into position and waited until he put his head down to feed. I have open sights, no scope but had practice on Tuesday at 20yds and was averaging 1" CTC groups with this very accurate 36. I squeeze the trigger and the groundhog jumps about 1.5ft up in the air! He falls to the ground and rolls around about 2 times and stops moving. I was like yes! I looked at him for a couple of secs and then load another pellet and go downstairs. I walk outside and there is no groundhog! I spot his behind going down the hole about 13-14ft away! I was like, not again! I immediately see a good amount of blood where he fell earlier. A couple of feet away more blood, and then some by the hole. He 's a gonner for sure. It's just a matter of time. It looks like he crawled all the way to the burrow because the grass was down flat and you can clearly see the trail to the hole. It sucks that I can't recover him. I think what happened was that he had just moved his head to look up at the windows again (he checks the 2 windows all the time because he 's seen me a couple of times) as I pulled the trigger. It all happened very fast but I remeber as soon as I pulled the trigger he was almost looking at me, so I 'm sure the pellet didn't hit the fuse box. He sure looked dead after he rolled around and stopped moving, but I couldn't see his head, it was pointing away from me, and g-hogs don't play dead. They always run for the nearest hole. I wonder what happened. Did he lose conciousness? I have shot many g-hogs and never seen this before except with a g-hog on youtube that got shot with a 30-06, went unconcious and then woke up and crawled to his hole, but this g-hog rolled around a couple of times and then stopped. Very weird. All the weird things seem to be happening to me lately..
