Not so sly

Saturday morning around 7am I was laying in bed half awake, and I heard the chickens cackling like something had startled them. This is nothing new, they do this often with lots of things: the dogs getting too close to them, a goat getting too close to them, and sometimes they just do it for no reason at all. But this time it was different than usual because they kept doing it, usually they stop after a few seconds but this was going on for a few minutes. I decided to go have a look so I went downstairs and peered out the window towards the chicken house. I saw that the goats were over in that area as well and they were huddled up with ears perked all looking in the same direction. This means there is something out there that is freaking the goats out. It also means that it is something that should not be there because the goats are used to all the other animals on the farm and they aren't freaked out by Jake and Macy (our dogs) either. So I looked in the direction that they were all looking and I spotted it......a red fox. It was coming towards the chicken coop and chickens (who weren't in the coop at this time). So, I yelled for Margo to wake up and I ran upstairs and had her grab the 12 gauge shotgun and I grabbed the 30-30 because I was not sure how close I would get to the fox and therefor what gun I would need. We snuck outside real quiet like to try and not scare off the fox. I walked over to the coop and checked there first, I hoped he would be inside so I could shoot him easily with the shotgun. He wasn't in there so I grabbed the 30-30 and walked around to the far side of the coop and saw him up in the woods. When he saw me he ran a little farther away from me and stopped and looked back at me. I pulled up the gun and put the scope on him and pulled the trigger and nothing happened, the safety was on. The fox took off running again, I re cocked the gun, he ran almost to the fence line and stopped and turned again. I put the scope on him again and fired. I then saw a brown thing running really fast away and I was really mad because I thought I had missed him, but then I realized that this thing had spots. It was a fawn that was really close to where the fox was that had jumped up and ran off when I fired. I ran up closer so I could see if I had killed the fox and there it was, dead. When I got closer I saw that I had hit it in the head. There is a lot of bone in the head so I guess when that 30-30 bullet hit all that bone it basically fragmented and blew the top part of that poor little fox's head right off. Seriously, the top of the head, gone. It was kind of awesome in a killing a fox kind of way. The sad news is that the fox had already killed three of our new little chickens before I got to it. In case any of you wanted to see a picture of the dead fox, minus the top of the head, I took some pictures. I won't post them on here in case any of you have a weak stomach or have a soft place in your heart for foxes (that kill chickens). So, click here if you want to see the picture. It was quite an event.