Part 4 of 6
I headed south on a two-track trail to my next PD town and also to have some lunch. I arrived at my parking spot around 1:50 p.m. I unloaded my ice chest, got my chair set up in some shade and started eating lunch. I was serenaded with a chorus of mooing by about 10 cows with their calves, and one Black Angus bull doing his grunting and high-pitched bellowing. This little herd of cattle was walking through the chokecherry trees not more than 15 feet to my right. I kept a watchful eye on them to make sure they weren’t after my sandwich. I was also somewhat worried that the cows might sense I was a danger to their calves and make a charge at me. I have had that happen when I’ve been out coyote calling, but have always managed to escape injury. I finished lunch around 2:35 p.m.
I got my .204 Ruger and other gear out and walked across a beaver dam to the other side of the creek and walked ENE along the creek bed to get near the east end of this dog town to begin shooting. I noticed some very colorful yellow coneflower blossoms along the creek and stopped to snap some photos. The yellow coneflower is named after the cone-like shape of its flowers. Plains Indians made tea from it to cure stomach and headaches, rattlesnake bites, and poison ivy. It was also used as dye. An insect decided he’d like to get into the photo and posed on the blossom for me.
There were many more yellow coneflowers in this spot and I took many more photos for my personal enjoyment, but I’ll share one more with you. This one has almost all of the brown cone portion at the middle of the flower completely intact.
I scared up a huge toad along the creek bed. I spent about 10 minutes trying to sneak around and get close to him, but I couldn’t get a decent photo of him because of all the grass along the creek edge.
I began shooting prairie dogs at about 3:05 p.m. Ten minutes later, I had taken 8 shots and hit on all those shots. The distances were only 75 to 125 yards. Shooting wasn’t too fast or furious after that and I had only shot 22 shots by 4:30. I had hit one double, had 19 singles, and missed on two shots. One of those shots was through a bunch of weeds and I’m sure the bullet was deflected. The other miss might have been due to me letting the barrel get way too hot, but it was a miss, nonetheless. I had worked my way to the NW end of the main dog town by now and since the gun barrel was extremely hot, I decided to sit down in the shade of the trees and have a couple cookies and some ice cold water. I checked the temperature here in the shade of some trees and it was 95.5º in the shade!!!
I sat down with my back to a tree and closed my eyes for a while. After about 5 minutes, I could hear a chipmunk chattering away. I got my camera out and tried to see where he was at. I finally spotted him rushing back and forth on an old dead bent tree trunk. I cranked the zoom on my camera up to 36X and steadied the camera as best I could and snapped one photo. I cranked the zoom up to 48X and took a few more photos of the little guy. I estimated he was 35 to 40 yards away from me, so the photos aren’t the best, but it was interesting to watch him running back and forth on this old dead tree trunk while he was chattering away.
