I practice at long range a bunch so I can be prepared should such a shot be the only thing that presents itself, but the wind, as you have pointed out, is a real bugger and except in very limited circumstances, I would not be confident in putting the 1st shot in an 8" kill zone on the first shot, at much beyond 500 yards. My targets are mostly 8" round plates, and one 12". The distance I am consistently putting the first round of the day in one of those plates is the distance I put my self imposed distance limit at. Being sure of that 1st shot is extremely important to me. A miss is fine, but I hate wounding something I have any respect for and I HATE wondering if I missed or wounded. I guess I'm more if a medium range hunter�
Beautiful Pronghorn and sounds like it was a heck of a fun hunt.
John
The shot I missed I wanted to err on the side of missing completely rather than hitting the animal where I didn't want to.
He was facing to the left perfectly broadside. His nose was to the wind. I didn't want to hold too little wind and hit him in the guts or ass, so I held a tad more left knowing that anything in the shoulder or behind would be DRT. It was a clean miss having held too much wind.
