The scimitar is a big beautiful animal that is tough and hard to bring down. It’s a real joy to watch how graceful they are as they run and amazing how one second they are there and the next they are gone from sight.
Back to more scouting, again. This time we see the sick animal, he is walking toward us but out of range, we wait and it grazes along and moves closer but still to far out. We wait, he is getting closer and then moves off the right and disappears into the brush in one step. Vanished. Gone. We move out to try and intercept him at the next crossing but it was no use. How do they do that, how does a 400 lb animal disappear within a few steps? We decide to regroup and have some late lunch. A quick sandwich, a half gallon of Gatorade and we’re ready to go.
We go back out into the heat of the day for more scouting. As we are moving down a road we see the Black Ram that Joe is after and he is on the stalk. He works within 25 yards of the ram and takes steady aim with his 30-30 loaded with the 110gr Hornady lite loads that we reported on a few weeks back. His first shot his perfect, right on the shoulder. To our surprise this little 100 pound rascal takes off up hill on the run. Joe follows up with two shots into the heart/lung area and he goes down. Joe placed these two shots within one inch of each other with the animal on the run, dang good shooting. Joes brings the animal back down the hill and lays him in the shade of a tree, both of us believing him to be dead when he decides that the fat lady has not sang yet and almost gets to his feet in a last gallant effort. Down for good it was time for paying our respect and a few photos of the beautiful ram.
The 110gr bullets that we worked up for using on small animals worked only okay with total penetration on all shots but appeared to only expand on the shoulder shot when hitting heavy bone. We found some small bits of lead and copper in the exit hole from the shoulder shot. We may need to regulate these loads to varmints.
About this time Joes ranch hand Paul shows up and joins in to help us “scout” for the “sick” Scimitar. Now with three people searching we were bound to locate a sick animal that is all but on his death bed. We dedicated about a total five hours of searching , 15 man hours, trying to find this ill and fading fast animal that only had days to live and only saw it for no more then a minute total out of all that time. Time ran out before we were able to accomplish our main goal and we had to head back home getting there about 11:30 Sunday night. After only 3 hours of sleep we were both ready for a well deserved good nights sleep. The only thing left to do now is to get the extra large quantity of dust out from the inside of my poor Jeep
Joe and his Black Ram
Me and my Scimitar
Look how thick the hide is on the Scimatar
Massive shoulder damage from 405gr rem bullets
!I too am interested in the cook'n part.
It had things backed up for a ways.