Riddle me this...

[Denis]

I get the feeling it's high time for something lighthearted around here - there's been so much gloom and doom since the US election results.

So, time for a little fun; namely a riddle.

Here's a still-life photo. Who can guess what it's about?

Hatband.JPG

I might even wrack my brains for a little prize for the best answer..., so you wrack yours

[FelixEstrella]

Hmmm. Sundowner Roo hat, a sprig of fir, 5 30-06 cartridges in a leather holder and a knife. Hmm. Any hints?

[Jered]

Christmas!

[Aglifter]

Hunting in Germany

[Ben S]

Hunting while wearing a "furry" hat?

[SeekHer]

Bagging an animal, German style...

Aussie hat, Boker knife, 7x65R rounds, two sprigs = two animals...

Congrats...

[Whirlibird]

Somebody's planning on spending some time in the bush.

Was originally going to take that a completely different direction, decided not to.
Good eating.

[SoupOrMan]

Though I don't hunt yet, what it looks like compared to what I've read is that someone may have lucked out while hunting.

[Denis]

OK, let's call that a tie between Aglifter and SeekHer (SH gets the nod for the details, but Ag was first . Shall we say an honourable mention to Jered and Ben S.?

Here's the story...

I was shooting in Germany on Friday - a driven hunt through woods on an army base.

The organisers put a line of twenty guns along a track through the centre of the woods, then beaters walked up. They came up from a valley bottom to above and behind the guns, then beat back down (to drive back any game which ran through the line on the first drive). It took about two hours. The weather was nice - dry and sunny, but it still got a bit chilly standing among the trees for that length of time. The experienced hunters all had shooting sticks to sit on...

view from position seven.JPG

I shot a red deer hind (Cervus elaphus, an adult female) and a boar. Apparently, I was very lucky, as it's not a place where they usually have red deer. Another of the guns got that deer's calf. The hind was a fairly easy shot - it mustn't have seen me standing behind my tree, as it walked past me broadside-on only about 60 metres away. It jumped at the shot, and took off like a rocket, but it only got about 100 metres. It collapsed in front of the next gun along the line. I shot the deer just as it passed in front of the three little yellow trees right of centre in the photo - about 60 metres away (this picture is a bit zoomed-in).

When we gutted it, it turned out that I had shot it right through the heart - half the upper portion of the heart was simply mising, and the body cavity was full of blood. The Norma Oryx 150-grain 7x65R softpoint bullet didn't exit the carcass on the other side, so it did its job perfectly, depositing all its kinetic energy in the beast. I didn't realise deer are so big and heavy - it took three of us to drag the carcass up the slope to the track, where we could put it onto a trailer. I didn't feel chilly any more after that!

I shot the boar in almost exactly the same spot - my position was above a sort of bottleneck at the top of a little track where the undergrowth was low, so anything that came up the slope was almost bound to pass in front of me. The pig did a 180-degree turn at the shot, and jogged off back down the valley from where it came. About 150 metres from me, it stopped, facing me, and stood there shivering. I waited until it turned a bit sideways, and gave it the second barrel. Then it disappeared down into the valley, where I couldn't see.

After the cease-fire, the forester, his dog and a helper with a rifle went looking for my boar. There was loads of blood to follow. The dog got the trail (and the message) straight away, but it took over an hour for the humans to figure out what had happened. The wounded pig had run away from me down the valley and, in doing so, it passed close to the line of guns once more. One of the other guns shot it then, not knowing that it had already been hit by me, and it was located and gathered up as usual. Nobody noticed that it had been shot twice, until the forester later realised that his dog had picked up the trail of an animal that had already been gathered in. When we then took a close look at the carcass, you could see that there were two shots. I must have hit the liver and spleen with my first shot, which wasn't enough to drop it quickly (but it would have bled out eventually), and the other hunter's (better) shot got the heart and lungs. My second shot at the pig must have missed it entirely - it was a long way off, and I wouldn't have risked a shot at that distance had the pig not already been wounded.

During the drive, I also saw three roe deer, a whole herd of boar, and a hare. I didn't want to shoot the hare (there wouldn't have been much left of it, anyway, after a hit from a rifle), and the boar came by in a bunch at a gallop, so there was no chance of picking out an individual - they just looked like a running black shaggy carpet. The three little deer presented themselves either head-on or tail-on, so there was no way to get a shot at them either, because when they were broadside-on to me, I would have been shooting along the line of guns...

In all, we shot two red deer (my hind and its calf), the mysterious two-places-at-once boar and four roe deer. I have one of the roes hanging in the garage now, so we'll have venison for Christmas dinner (once I hang, butcher and freeze it). The hunt director got that one with a brilliant neck-shot from his 8mm Mauser, so there was no bullet damage to the torso at all - both front shoulders are intact, but the head was just barely hanging on by a bit of skin.

strecke.JPG

Most of the hunters were using Mauser-type bolt actions (lots of full Mannlicher-style stocks), mainly with low-power scopes (Swarowski, Zeiss and S&B), although I saw at least two using open sights, and one other had a Docter red-dot sight like mine. A couple of the others asked me about the Docter, and said they're thinking of getting them too. Three or four (mostly the foresters) had drillings, and one elderly gentleman was shooting a side-by side 12-gauge with rifled barrel inserts.

At the end of the shoot, they laid out the animals on a bed of pine boughs for all to inspect, and played hunting-horn fanfares for them. The shoot director gave a little speech, and presented the successful guns with pine sprigs to wear in their hat-band for the rest of the day. He also had me dig out and keep my red deer's two upper canine teeth; apparently German hunters regard those as a valuable trophy.

let me out.JPG

One little German hunter who wasn't allowed out during the shoot...

[SeekHer]

Ok, ok, great, whadda we get? I want chocolate!

Sorry, I cheated as he already had e-mailed me the results of his hunt so I can’t claim a prize...