“You did it, you got it!” My friend Alexia made my Browning T-Bolt safe and rose, handing it back to me.
I caught the brass casing she had ejected and handed her the shell she had just used to shoot her first hare. She took it from me triumphantly. I indicated the clump of grass 80-odd yards away and she and her friend Phoebe paced across in the general direction.
It had been an intense stalk, two minutes after me whispering that the hares tend to frequent the fence lines and stay near the shelter belts, there she was, right in the middle of the paddock! The problem with open grassy areas such as this is that as soon as you get prone to use the bipod, the undulations of the ground and grass often obscures the target from view. Watching through the 10 x 40 Steiners, I'd had Alexia slowly close the gap whenever the hare had been facing away or feeding - head down, and we had managed to get away with it for longer than I had anticipated. We'd spooked three or four already, and once the ears had gone down and back, I'd figured it was “now or never.” We'd made it to a slight rise in the ground, and the animal had still been in view but had inconveniently ducked down in the Crack – whoosh! The grass above the hare's back had parted violently. It had run a little to the right, then turned and come back more or less where it had started, frozen in place and in full view now. “Right, now keep your finger away from the trigger and pull the bolt right out and back in again. Take your time, there's no rush.”
