Montana hunt

[Richard Flanders]

I got back to the area where I always hunt when here today and had multiple shots each at pheasants, huns, and sharpies. Only managed one sharpie in the bag but it wasn't because the opportunities for more weren't there, though most of the 16 shots I took today were pretty long. It's a gorgeous place to hunt. Sloping land with wheat fields transected by brushy washes - what can be better than that? I've got pans of looking both down onto the lower lands and up towards the higher areas. The clump of trees on the dam in the second pan can be seen about dead center in the first picture. The pond behind that little dam was full of mallards. You just chase birds up and down those drainages all day. I came up one and kicked a couple of single sharpies out and when I got to where the drainage headed out at a wheat field the adjacent hilltop erupted in a cloud of sharptails... not sure how many but it was about "an acre" of sharpies. I got off four shots as they took off away from me into the wind then turned downwind and sailed past me at horrendous speed in the 25mph wind that was blowing. Good thing I got a bird on the first shot! Of course, just to keep Bruce happy, I hit it with only one pellet and that was in the head; not a single other hole in the bird when I filleted it out. That was intentional, of course..... I waited until he turned his head a bit to look at me before taking the shot...