Rural NSW, Australia. Middle of summer (about 40 Celsius). I know a few people who own some land down there (about 500km north-west of Sydney if you care), and occasionally I ask them if I can camp out at their property, and usually they let me. One time, about a year back, I was in a clearing by myself with a new rifle (and by new I mean recently purchased, but used), hadn't zeroed it in or anything, and it had this odd issue where it wouldn't chamber a round from the magazine sometimes, meaning you had to manually load each bullet. My car was about 100 metres behind me. I wasn't intending on hunting, just felt like going for a walk, however the area I was in was filled with all sorts of feral animals, so it was best to be on the safe side. ANyway, this precaution probably saved me from some serious harm when a bitch and her 3 young-ish children tracked me down. I've never seen anything like it before (I never really go hunting) - they followed the [i]exact[/i] path that I had walked through, meaning they had caught my scent and come for food. My suspicions were proven correct when they started fronting on me. I never realized that ferals would have the intelligence to employ any strategy, but sure enough two of the dogs had pissed off out of sight, to, I assume, attack me from behind. I'll admit, I was uneasy, but if anything went too sketchy, I had my rifle. They weren't stopping, and the snarling kept on getting louder, so I attempted to load my rifle and fire off a shot over their heads so as to scare them off. Sure enough, heap of shit jams. Now I'm shaking, because there's no-one nearby for about an hour in any direction, and my gun won't load. So, I had to attempt to chamber a round manually, an action that can be done in a manner of seconds when in any "controlled" situation (read: when you have your shit together) but feels like forever when there's two mean-ass dogs snarling at you and two others that have disappeared off to god knows where. I finally get a round in, and shoot it over the heads of the bitch and the young dog, and into the dirt behind them. As you would guess considering my luck thus far, it did nothing. Now I was thinking I was really up shit creek - If I shot one, I assume that the others would attack, and I've been told that ferals really like going for the neck. I was almost at my car - it would take around 5 seconds to get to it, and the dogs that I could see were about 10 metres away from me at this point. I went for it - my magazine actually chambering a round this time, I shot another round into the air and bolted. I gained a few seconds while the ferals ducked, and got to the door just as they started to run after me. Of course the door was locked - the window however, wasn't. I was incredibly lucky those ferals didn't bite my ass, and the seemingly trivial and controllable event spiraled into madness pretty quickly. Was I in any real amount of danger? I don't know. What I do know is that the two young dogs had flanked me like I thought they would - the fact that they were hunting me makes me think yes, I could have been in some shit. I don't know if I can take down 4 feral dogs with a gun that barely worked and my hands in a manner of seconds.