Jim's Blog
When It Rains, It Pours—Disaster Strikes
Nightmare come true today; it was pouring rain all night. We waited until about 7 a.m. and then finally headed down toward our stand. Figured we'd get into the Double Bull blind and maybe the rain won't affect us in there. We were actually walking down there with umbrellas and we bumped into a herd of mountain nyala including a great big bull. It was low light and raining hard; I got up on the sticks and ... wounded him.
I don't know what happened; I didn't look through my binos; I had seconds to take the shot; I thought he was quartering to me, but he was actually quartering away from me. We're thinking it went in and out too far forward in the front of the shoulders. We tracked him for four or five hours and approximately three miles down the mountain and back up again almost right to the same place we shot him at. It was like he was going back to look for his cows. We only saw 10 drops of blood total the whole time, so I don't know what happened. Just a mess. I did the very best that I could and I was dead steady when I pulled the trigger. Everything should have been perfect.
Who knows? It's hunting, and I sure feel terrible for the animal, but I can't do better than that. It was 125 yards. Bad, bad day all the way around.
We actually think that he's going to come back out, so we think he's fine and that he's going to get with his cows again and he might come back out. We're going to sit tomorrow morning just in case and then we're going to head out of here hunt for a few days in another area and then come back again for the last few days of the hunt. Hopefully by then he'll be back to normal and doing the routine. He has a real unique spot pattern on his side; we have good video footage of him, so we know what he looks like, and there's a fair chance we'll bump into him again.
Otherwise today was a disaster, but nobody got hurt, so it's not the end of the world and it is hunting, so no matter how good you are, that happens.
4/2/2010
