It had been a cool morning for early fall, and daylight came wrapped in thick fog. Doves began flying before sunrise and the action continued nearly through noon. I had occupied a stand alone for the first time, working well away from any other shooter while I figured things out for myself. Now the morning was done.
Our truck’s tailgate lay open. I lay my dove bucket on its side and tipped it up from the bottom. Four birds and six empty shell boxes slid out. Two shovel scoops worth of yellow plastic hulls clattered onto steel to highlight the moment. In the full course of the morning I had made one legitimate wingshot.
The other three birds were my fellow shooters’ cripples I’d scratched down from limbs of the big oak I’d been directed to sit under, presumably for that purpose. That’s four properly-spent rounds out of 150 if you’re counting, and the Old Man definitely was.
“I missed a few,” I said to get ahead of what was coming.
“How far do you reckon your shotgun will shoot?” he asked.
“The hunter safety course said a rifle bullet could go a mile,” I said, “but they didn’t say how far No. 7 1/2 shot would go.”
“On some of yours this morning you needed half a bullet’s range,” he said. “You can’t really call it a miss if what you shot at was twice as far away as you could hit. Calling that a miss implies there was some chance for a hit, which there wasn’t.”
“I know you said not to shoot over 30 yards,” I said, “but when you’re looking up in the sky it’s hard to judge how far 30 yards is.”
“I know,” he said. “It takes experience. You have to learn what a dove looks like at 30 yards. Say, as opposed to 90.”
“Aw come on,” I said. “I didn’t try any that far.”
“Well, 50 then,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter how far it is if it’s too far. Too far is too far. Which reminds me, you need to make it a rule of thumb to never shoot three times at the same bird.”
“Is that bad luck or something?” I asked.
“It is if you’re the one paying for the shells,” he said. “If the bird was in range when you shot the first time and he’s still flying after the second, he’ll definitely be out of range before you can send a third. That’s just simple math. If he’s still in range when you could send a third, it means you fired the first time before he was in range. Most likely you’d be wasting one shell at both ends and squandering the one in the middle for good measure.”
“You could have told me this before we went out there,” I said.
“I could have,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have meant much without experience and I’d have had to say it all to you again. Experience is the framework for you to hang all my good advice on. Now, if you’re as smart as you think you are, you can learn this with just one telling, and also I won’t have to say, ‘I told you so.’
“Also, next time just load one shell into the gun at a time. That’ll make you a lot more appreciative of the narrow band of your opportunity.”
“It should make my percentages go up, too,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure it will,” he said with a grin. “There’s not much room for them to go down.”
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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