An elderly poacher waiting for a boar in a tree in a Tyumen region forest hit and killed his target when he heard noises down below.
But the one who took the bullet on Sunday night was not a boar but the man's 26-year-old son-in-law, who apparently got bored of waiting in another tree, the region's Investigative Committee .
The unidentified son-in-law decided to play a joke on his 68-year-old relative by imitating a boar, the committee said in a statement. The older man could not tell his son-in-law from a boar because it was dark.
The father-in-law immediately informed the police about the incident. Though the committee described the hunting trip as "illegal," the hunter was not charged with poaching but faces up to two years in prison for voluntary manslaughter.
In a separate incident Sunday, a hunter in the Chelyabinsk region shot himself dead when finishing off a wounded raccoon with the butt of his rifle, local news web site Dostup1.ru . Two friends were with the 22-year-old when the gun went off, and investigators are looking into whether the death might have been staged as an accident, the report said.
No information was available on the fate of the raccoon. Some news reports said it was actually a badger.
Police may yet rule out foul play because this is not the first such incident in recent memory. In January, a wounded fox shot a hunter in Belarus, hitting the trigger of the rifle with a paw when the hunter tried to finish it off with the gun's butt. The hunter was hospitalized but survived.
