Revenge of the Chicken

An Odd Tale of Home Defense

 
There was an interloper on the premises last week.  It was a sneaky, masked, murderous bandit.  You guessed it, it was a raccoon.  The result was the tragic death of one of our most beloved chickens.  It was the Buff Orpington named Billina who had been the mother hen of our flock.

Ten Minute Silence to honor her memory begins now.

7 minutes, 37 seconds: someone sneezed.  We’ll have to start the 10 minutes over.

OK. 

There had been some tracks around, and we were able to deduce that this night stalker had been around our house for a little while.  Mrs. Rifleslinger decided to set a trap for it.  I don’t really agree with the concept of trapping.  It's not that I think it's cruel, I just don’t find that it has the same punctuated, satisfying finality as a bullet.

At around 2130 I heard some excitement downstairs.  The Missus had seen the little sucker in the carport, adjacent to our basement.  I didn’t have the right tool handy for the job at that moment.

We live in town, so things like this have to be handled with some delicacy and consideration for things like noise, safe backstops and such.  The stuff I keep generally handy would have been overkill, although I wouldn’t have minded causing a meat explosion with a 5.56 at 5 yards.  I retrieved a 10/22 while everyone else watched the little sucker climb up a tree about 7 yards from the downstairs door.  Some stray dogs (another nice problem, huh?) had scared it out of the kill zone.

The ideal solution to this problem, rather than a trap, would be a silent, invisible, armed sentry remaining motionless, save for the slight movement of the trigger finger after hours of waiting.  I figured that I don’t live in an ideal world and I had to work the next morning at 0700, so I went to bed.

At about 2330 I woke up to a soft growling noise.  The dog was alerted to something.  At first I didn’t want to get out of bed, but when I recalled the prospect of shooting something I found the motivation to get up.  I looked out from the upstairs window.  What did I see there climbing down the tree?  Why, it was the raccoon!  It had waited in a tree for 2 hours to come back down.

Over about 5 minutes it stealthily worked its way down that last 10 feet, stopping to look around every few seconds.  I crept down the stairs and chambered a round as silently as possible. When I reached the carport sliding glass door I could see it still working its way down.  I had left the door unlocked in anticipation.  I freed the door just a little, then about a minute later I slid it just a little more, giving me about an inch opening to shoot through.  I slid the muzzle in just enough to clear the glass and held the barrel there like a pool cue.

The carport motion sensor light kicked on.  The raccoon had gotten used to this happening, so it was no big deal.  It kept looking in my direction.  The slight noise of the door opening had likely made it a little nervous.  It took about 5 minutes for it to move from the tree to a better spot where I could see it.  During that time I started to slowly bring the stock to my shoulder.

My quarry moved a little too far to the left and I just waited.  The air outside was 20° and it just kept flowing into the house where I stood in my underwear.  The floor was also cold on my bare feet.

While I waited it started moving back to the kill zone.  I took a second to try to orient myself to the tech sights in the dark.  The aperture on the tech sights is optimized for shooting AQT’s, but it really is useless in the dark.  Before going to bed I had figured out that if I place the front sight in the center of the blurry obstruction, my sights are pretty much aligned.

The raccoon kept standing up and looking in my direction.  It was careful, patient, and quiet.  I was impressed at its degree of caution.  But for the soft growling of a dog 10 minutes earlier, no one would have ever known it was there.  Dogs are cool!

It reached the perfect spot and stood up on its hind legs to a height of about two and a half feet.  It was looking right at me.  I set the tip of the front sight in the center of its masked face.  It shifted a little to its right as if trying to make sense out of what it was looking at.  The shift briefly took away my shot.  It shifted back into my field of view and I started gently pressing back on what is by far the worst trigger I own.  Creep, slack, creep, slack, resistance... POP!

The shot hit home.  The little sucker started convulsing violently, shaking, flopping about, and kicking.  It was a lovely, heartwarming sight.  I had to call my wife to come downstairs so she could enjoy it as well.  For about a full minute it continued to do the funky chicken, which is the irony of ironies, since a chicken is what it had killed to reap this consequence.  

A postmortem inspection revealed that the bullet had hit it in the mouth.  There was no exit wound.  The chickens snacked on bits of its fat while we skinned it.  No, we did not eat it.

We should have a new hat before too long.