Gary Reeder
only the first shot was a good aimed shot, and even then he
Thursday, October 14, 2021, 10:54

was behind some extremely heavy thorn bushes to where I could only see his eyes looking at us. In the picture he is behind the bush at 10 o"clock. We had driven up to within 5 feet of the cat. John told the driver to back up slow and we got back another 5 feet to about 10 feet from the cat. John said the big cats will lie in wait until you get right on them and then will come up into the truck. And they can do a lot of damage in a Land Cruiser full of people. When we stopped at about 10 feet I had to have the tracker point him out and then could only see his eyes.
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I could only aim a bit to one side of the eyes hoping for a neck spinal shot. At the shot with the 378 GNR he jumped in the air doing a complete back flip.
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John said hit him again. He told me earlier to keep hitting the lion and don't let him get his feet under him or he is going to get up in the truck and hurt someone. With that in mind I hit him again.
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At this shot he flipped in the air again and started spinning around so I hit him somewhere in the body the 3rd time.
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At this point I took another shot and shot over him. The lion managed to get some momentum going and ran for a big tree off to our left. I took my last shot with the 378 GNR and again missed him. The G-2 was empty so I grabbed the 510 GNR and hit him in the left ham as he was running for the big tree. Not a killing shot but enough to slow him down a bit.
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The lion was determined to get to the tree. Just as he got under the first branches I hit him again with the 510 just ahead of his hips in the lower spine area. The bullet exited in the lower chest area blowing up a cloud of dust. This put him on the ground at the base of the big tree in the background. In the picture he is at the top just to the right of center behind the only green bush.
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He managed to crawl under the low limbs with his back to me. I had jumped out of the truck and got to maybe 15 feet of him and put 2 more shots into his back and that was it for him. Which was good as I only had one round left in the 510 GNR revolver and no time to reload.
So 3 shots with the 378 GNR and 4 with the 510 GNR. And the big cat was still growling and snapping his teeth. And being the shots were any place in a spinning and flipping cat I could put a bullet I guess the penetration was fine. The skinners managed to locate 3 of the 510 GNR bullets and 2 of the 378 GNR bullets. Each was mushroomed fully and the noses on the 510s were flattened completely so they did their job.
And again thanks to Michael Mendes for taking the pictures.
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