One Heck Of A Ride

137 My Introduction To European Hunting should shoot, I raised my rifle, and suddenly found that every time my face got close to the scope it Gredos Ibex with author fogged up! It took several tries, but I finally got off a shot. The bullet apparently came apart in flight because, although a large portion struck the billy low in its belly, fragments also hit various other places, including its testicles. The billy and the herd ran off with Juan and me in hot pursuit. My next shot, taken quickly, slammed the ibex down. I was one happy hunter. My billy’s horns were 27 1/2 inches long, an excellent representative specimen of the Gredos ibex. Lad Shunneson shot his ibex the next day. After climbing the same mountain and finding nothing but solid fog again, we built a fire, ate our lunches, and waited it out. When it broke, we found a group of billys chasing females and again used the fog to move closer. When we were eighty yards out, Lad used a rock to steady his rifle and killed the billy instantly with one shot from my .30-378. Once again, the bullet blew up inside the animal. The horns on Lad’s ibex were only an inch shorter than mine, and also an excellent representative animal. With the hunt over, we did as the Spaniards do: We watched a flamenco dance show and took our wives shopping and sightseeing. Despite having to fight the fog and rain, some minor car trouble, and a stolen passport our trip had been a success. (While traveling by car near a town called Valladolid, we started having car problems. Juan saidwe needed to stop and get it checked before we could go any farther. While waiting to learn what the problem was, we decided to walk to several local shops. At one shop, Marty was going to buy something when she discovered her passport and wallet were not in her backpack. The five of us had been walking together, and someone was able to remove things from that backpack and not one of us saw it happen. Panicked, we all retraced our steps, looked in trashcans and returned to stores, all to no avail. Juan called the police to report the incident and got a copy of their report so we could carry it with us across Spain until we could get to the U.S. Embassy in Madrid.) When we returned to the car-repair place, we learned our vehicle’s alternator needed to be replaced and the part would not arrive from Madrid until the next day. We spent the night in Valladolid at Hotel Barelredo and were back on the road by noon. Marty’s journey across Spain without a passport was unsettling to her. Fortunately, I had made a copy of her passport to carry with me “just in case” and she was able to get a new passport for our return home. After that incident, she has never worn a backpack on any of our trips.) When I returned to Lompoc, I wrote Mike Harris at the Nosler Bullet Company and told him about my 180-grain Partitions failing on chamois and ibex, and he asked me to send him bullets from the same box so he could test fire them at various velocities. I did, and he wrote me to say they had found that the bullets came apart at speeds over 3,250 feet per second. He also sent me a few boxes of bullets they’d restructured for velocities over 3,500 fps. With the proper ammunition, the .30-378 Weatherby Magnum with its Accubrake is one of the smoothest rifles I’ve shot. There were a few bugs at first, but it could become one of