Chapter I: Wing-Shooting Problems

In wing-shooting an object in motion must be struck by missiles from an arm also in motion. The whole science of wing-shooting consists in delivering a charge of shot, not directly at the flying target, but to a point where the bird will be when the charge reaches it. A woman novelist states the matter very naïvely when telling her sister sportswomen how to shoot English sparrows with a 22 rifle. Incidentally the lady cleverly demonstrates that she possesses all those qualities of lively imagination so requisite in a writer of “fiction for girls.” According to the authoress she early discovered that when attempting to hit the little birds while they were sitting she missed because of their springing away with the flash of the gun, but when she jumped them and shot _where they would be when the bullet got there_ she killed them every time. Wing-shooting is as simple as that, merely shoot exactly where the bird will be when the shot gets there and success is certain, even with a rifle.

Many of us have had more trouble to do this with a shotgun, however, than this feminine writer of fiction seems to have found with a rifle, hence this book on the science of wing-shooting. If the birds invariably flew in the same direction with a motion as even as the flight of an arrow, at one unvarying rate of speed, and the gunner knew how to gauge the speed and angle to the fraction of an inch, possessing at the same time the mechanical regularity of a machine in every movement he made, I see no reason why he should not be as successful as the lady.

In field shooting every separate shot may afford its own individual problem which must be solved instantly if the game is to be killed. Wing-shooting problems are highly complex, moreover, because nearly every factor is unknown. The only factor, indeed, that is absolutely known, or should be, is that when the gun is held right the bird is killed. The death of the bird proves, _per se_, that the problem was correctly solved, and there is no other correct solution. Reasoning backward from results we know that the mind stated the unknown factors with truth and reckoned from them without error. However, suppose the bird were missed, the question then is to learn which of the unknown factors was misstated, and here our difficulties begin. It reminds me of a department in an old arithmetic of my father’s which was called supposition. You supposed such and such to be the case, and this governed a second unknown quantity, which finally led to solving the problem provided your first supposition had been correct; otherwise you tried again--in wing-shooting at another bird.

The unknown factors in wing-shooting are the behavior of the shot charge and where it has gone when you miss; the direction, rate of speed, and evenness of flight of the target; the mechanical ability of the gunner to perform certain acts with absolute regularity and precision; the behavior of the shooter’s mind and nerves under varying degrees of tension.

If only one of these unknown quantities were known, fixed, and stable it would immensely facilitate learning to shoot on the wing. For instance, if our shot charge went up to the target in the shape of a ball, approximately thirty inches in diameter, that we could see strike or miss the target, we could all learn more of this art in a year than we now do in a lifetime. The expert shot can frequently tell why he has missed and where his charge went, but not so the novice for whom we are writing. Even the most experienced are frequently puzzled as to the cause of missing, though in their case it merely adds to the fascination of the game which would lose in interest if made too easy.

In the same way if we could shoot at game which had an undeviating line of flight, with angles that never changed and a speed that never varied, striking the mark would be greatly simplified. We would then have conditions similar to those that govern trap shooting at artificial birds where high scores are made with such regularity as to become monotonous.

Given a shot charge that could be seen and a target at known angles whose rate of flight never changed, and we would still have two unstable factors to contend with; the inability to make a perfect mechanical machine of the human body and poor team work on the part of brain and nerves. Mechanically, nature has endowed us differently. A man may be able to draw one straight line, but if you tell him to draw ten, one of them will be crooked; some other can draw ten straight lines but will fail before reaching a hundred. The more difficult the task and the longer continued, the higher the degree of mechanical skill required. An expert modern trapshot is simply a great mechanic and nothing else, but a high degree of mechanical skill is a requisite in every description of wing-shooting. Nevertheless it is only _one_ of the factors that lead to success in live bird shooting.

The action of an individual’s mind and nerves under varying degrees of excitement is one of the shooting factors that are extremely hard to control. Reliable work can only be accomplished by the man whose mind and nerves have been trained to that very sort of thing. They must work with automatic rapidity, without effort, under all circumstances. Pulling the three-pound trigger of a shotgun is a very simple thing but it takes one man six times as long to accomplish it as it does another, or the trigger may be pressed in four-hundredths of a second ordinarily but under excitement will be pulled in one-hundredth of a second. If one pull places the charge upon the bird the other would probably miss it.

It might be well to illustrate some of the shooting principles mentioned. A quail is passing the gun at a distance of twenty yards and the arm is aligned two feet ahead of the bird and fired, resulting in a kill. Now the student of wing-shooting has an apparent foundation to work upon, one of his unknown factors has become a fixed quantity; a bird crossing at right angles, twenty yards distant, can be killed by holding two feet in advance. But the next bird that affords a similar shot is a duck and shooting two feet in front of it scores a clean miss. His theory of holding two feet ahead of the target proved wrong in this case and he must find reasons. By and by it may occur to him that the duck was flying faster than the quail, forty feet a second faster. The necessity of closely calculating the speed of flight of the target is thus strongly impressed, and it dawns upon him that one of the unknown factors, speed of flight, can never become a fixed quantity, but must always be estimated, and upon his sound judgment depends his skill as a shot.

The next duck that comes along he leads four feet and kills, much to his satisfaction, for now he knows that two feet in advance of a quail will kill it and four feet in front will connect with ducks. However, a third duck is of a different variety, one that comes loitering by at twenty miles an hour. A pull four feet ahead of this fowl results in another rank miss and a badly puzzled shooter. Holding two or four feet in advance doesn’t all depend on the variety of bird for the same wings can carry it fast or slow, and every bird must be judged individually.

Again a quail comes by. A two feet lead will surely kill him as it did before, but just as the trigger is pressed the bird suddenly swoops, and the charge goes harmlessly above him. Birds must fly evenly if our novice is to strike them; yes, and any one else--that is what the second barrel is for. Yet another duck wings by and the gunner means to try that four foot lead again, but the aim is high. He knows it, but there is no time for more than the one aim and he cannot avoid throwing his charge away. Our tyro has learned something else, though, if he is to kill he must have the mechanical ability to place his charge exactly where he means it to go, otherwise the knowledge of speed and where to hold that he has been acquiring is all wasted.

More opportunities occur and the student resolves to be extremely careful as to where he places his next shot. All his movements are more deliberate. He swings slowly and pulls steadily and carefully, as nearly as he can judge exactly four feet ahead of the duck, but it goes on without the loss of a feather. Now what the deuce was wrong? Did he fail to estimate the speed, or to hold where he intended? He may not know it or learn what was the trouble for a long time, but the miss was due entirely to his extreme care and over caution, to dwelling on the trigger and taking six-hundredths of a second to pull it in place of his usual one-hundredth. During the time lost by his over carefulness the bird flew four feet and the shot passed away behind. His finger and brain worked together like balky horses, when one lunged forward the other held back.

Gradually he acquires knowledge, but all birds do not fly past at twenty yards. A big bird swings down upon him and he thinks it very close, but the usual lead fails to cut a feather. His gun swung to the very spot he wished, he pulled in exact time, the flight of the fowl never wavered from a straight line, and yet he missed. Neither would he ever have known why except for a friend standing near who asked him where he had held and how far off he considered the bird to be. His reply was twenty-five yards and he had held five feet in front of the old drake. He was skeptical when told that the fowl was not less than forty-five yards distant and that he should have aimed from eight to ten feet in front of it.

All this will be dwelt upon later. Here I wish merely to impress upon the reader that the difficulties of wing-shooting lie almost entirely in the inability of the gunner to detect the cause of error. Should he ascribe the trouble to one thing and it proves to be something else, he will surely go farther astray. There is no such thing as profiting by our mistakes unless we know what those mistakes are. A bird might be missed by giving it too much lead while the shooter, concluding he had not led enough, would get farther and farther out with every succeeding miss. Very likely the result of a perfect estimate of distance, angle, and speed is thrown away by the novice keeping poor time, swinging too fast or too slow, with a consequent placing of the charge elsewhere than where he thinks he did. Under such circumstances the most natural and easiest thing to do is to change the point of aim with the inevitable additional misses that are as certain to follow as that two wrongs do not make a right.

A false diagnosis leads to the novice swallowing many bitter and useless doses. It is like a hunter hurrying to camp but on the wrong road, the faster he walks the farther off he gets.

Some of the problems of wing-shooting are much more complex than any of the foregoing. It took the writer a good ten years of steady practice to solve one, and he thinks well of his work at that. Through years of shooting I was considerably exercised by the fact that I missed easy shots, generally quail going straight away or gently quartering--shots that should have been as easy as falling off a log. Very often this happened when I was perfectly cool and collected, covering my target with such ease and certainty that missing should have been impossible. By and by, from being told by companions and seeing the shot strike the water or sand, I learned that the trouble was shooting low. There was no doubt that I missed by shooting under, but I couldn’t see why when the bird had been quivering along just above the muzzle of my gun as it had a thousand times before when killed. One thing was obvious; I only lost the birds that I felt sure of killing, those that were covered with deliberate, calculating accuracy.

That being the case, I had only to quicken time, or shoot a trifle more recklessly to kill, and this I could do. However, this did not satisfy me; I wished to know reasons for the miss as the only sure means of preventing its recurrence. My first conclusion was that with deliberate shots I flinched and dropped the muzzle without knowing it. This satisfied me in a way, though I worried because I never could detect the flinching or discover means of preventing it. Then I solved the mystery though I still miss the birds sometimes.

Here is the solution which applied in my case and might or might not in others. At the exact instant when an experienced shot expects his weapon to be discharged, he unconsciously leans forward to catch the recoil which would otherwise throw him backward out of balance, preventing the quick delivery of his second barrel. Now suppose the weapon misses fire, there being no recoil to restore the equilibrium of the body, it continues forward and if the gunner is standing in a light duck boat he may be pitched out. On firm ground the muscles of the feet will quickly restore him to position, but he will find his gun pointing well beneath the target.

In a minor degree all this happened to me when I pulled deliberately. Leaning forward to catch the kick which did not come at the anticipated time because of slow pulling, down went the muzzle of my gun enough to insure a miss. Of course leaning forward might not depress the muzzle of the gun if you did it consciously, but not one shooter in a thousand knows that he does it, and considerable poor work can be attributed to this cause.

Close observation, experience, and practice will take you safely over the road to the expert wing-shot’s camp, and the farther you travel the smoother the path becomes--only do not take the wrong trail or walk in a circle, neither trust any one else to more than point the direction you ought to go.

In an entire day’s field shooting no two shots may be alike; indeed, it is a question if two shots are ever exactly similar in live bird shooting. One bird is driving, another is coming in; this little chap quarters with a rising flight, and the next is dropping like a bullet; the snipe dodges, while the mallard swerves and towers; now a wary old pintail beats up against the wind and hovers over the decoys, but forty yards beyond a blue wing teal whistles down the wind at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. No man ever lived or ever will live that could kill them all, which is as it should be.

I can remember the time when I could recall every kill made during an entire season and where I held for the shot. That time will never come to me again. The very best sport is enjoyed only by the ambitious novice who is just beginning to learn. Youth, a good gun, and the brown birds rising in the ragweed field need ask no odds of king or millionaire. What matter if in five only one solved problem has deadly results, life is before the boy and the skill that is surely coming to every man who loves the gun.