So…you’ve probably noticed a ton of missing posts. Well….I lost them in a quite unfortunate harddrive crash - you might remember my earlier comments about a failing disk in the server…well it caught up with me and I had no backups. Sad really. Thankfully I only lost 3 months of weblog posts and some other “/var” metadata. Photos need to be reposted on the gallery, but at least none were lost permanently.

So…the real reason for me breaking my silence is that I’ve finally have achieved the next level of Zen in Killing Fuzzies. My youth was spent with various BB guns and smaller rifles/shotguns harassing sparrows and bunnies on the farm. In recent memory, bunnies are still fun to shoot — but the main drive has been for deer and elk. I used to fly back every Thanksgiving for the usual meal with the family, then would abandon them for 2 or 3 days to head up into the hills in search of fuzzies. I always managed to get a deer (and oh what joy it is to check a cooler full of venison and dry ice on an airplane), but elk eluded us — mainly because we are the Great White Truck Hunters. In 4 or 5 years of hunting Elk, we only saw 2. They were ~2000 yards away and just a bit out of range.

Last year marked me getting serious — I purchased a Browning Medallion 300 WSM, Leupold 3-10×40 scope for my hunting pleasures. For those who case — I am shooting a 180 grain Winchester Supreme Ballistic Tip. I got my deer with it last year, but was not having that great of luck this year — jsut an odd year of deer getting shot and then running away. Furburgers. I am chalking it up to the fact that I’ve moved back to Montana and was hunting earlier than my Karma was used to.

Well.. this last Friday turned my luck around. I went hunting with my sister’s beau and his father. Our main goal was to fill out our deer tags in this last weekend of hunting. To make a long story short…we didn’t see any deer right away, but found a nice big Elk for me to take home. It is likely the largest animal that I will ever shoot, future elk included. It even made the beast ride odd — the rear end had enough weight to make it bounce a bit on the highway when we hit dips. The 5×7 rack measured in with bases of 11.5″, spread of 39.5″ and longest side of 50.5″. Yes friends, it is getting mounted on the wall :) — But only a full European (skull & horns), mainly because it had a broken skull at one point and the horns are offset — very cool. It is now at the butcher and I should have the meat back in a day or two. Yummy! Oh yeah — I found the round in the Elk too — it was fully mushroomed (lead core missing) and just under the hide on the exit side — talk about it leaving all of the energy in the animal. Grunt

In the freezer you!