Didn't get in a lot of hunting this afternoon, the rain came on in sooner than I had thought it would. Good thing I had a waterproof jacket on. BUT I did manage to get one. I spotted it and estimated the range to be around 35 yards or so, fired one shot and dropped it; then I headed over to where it had fallen, and it was much further than I'd guessed, over 50 yards and I was fortunate that I didn't miss it being off that far guessing distance. Had to place the bullet between two limbs, as all that was exposed was the frontal half of the body, so the bullet struck the spine just behind and over the front legs, instant death. This batch of CCI Minimags has been excellent, I'm well pleased with them. It would have been nice to get a case instead of a brick, but things ain't like dat no mo', ammo is where it is and money is when it is too. Money and ammo availability happened to coincide happily.

I got to try out something new: having been using game shears with moderate success, I was thinking that something with shorter blades would be better, to get more leverage so that the tip of the snips would be able to cut through the tailbone, negating the need to do the initial slit through the base of the tail and tailbone with a knife. These new snips worked superbly, never even got a knife out of my pocket. These are Wiss shears that I found at Marvin's Building Supply locally. There is a notch area nearer the hinge identical to typical game shears for cutting through the leg bones, and the shorter and slimmer blades slide easily between skin and flesh to do the tail flap. Quick pull, zip, hide off, rip hide off the back legs with finger pulls and then snip snip snip snip, snip, feet and head gone, flip over and start lower blade into the neck opening, slide quickly to the pelvic bones, snip, insert finger above the diaphragm, rake out guts and done. Fastest and easiest I have ever done a squirrel skin and gut. The shears were less than ten bucks too. I've stumbled onto a few things over the years that happened to turn out working very well for me, these go on the "good" list. :t
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