LONG-RANGE SHOOTING AT GAME. 311 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 



LONG-RANGE SHOOTING AT GAME. 



THERE is probably no subject connected with shoot- 

 ing about which so much nonsense has been written 

 and spoken as the distance at which game can be 

 killed with the rifle. This was bad enough in the 

 days of muzzle-loaders. It has become doubly bad 

 in these days of long-range and mid-range breech- 

 loaders. We now know that such shooting as Cooper 

 and a host of novelists have ascribed to their heroes, 

 such shooting as we have all in our early days read 

 about as being common among the backwoods hun- 

 ters, was impossible with any rifle, and especially with 

 the small-bored rifle and round ball then almost uni- 

 versally in use among hunters in the woods. But 

 now that rifles are found in every shop that will shoot 

 into a two-foot ring at five hundred yards (under 

 target-shooting conditions and care), it is quite natural 

 to suppose that game can be killed as a matter of course 

 at three or four times the distance at which it could 

 once be done. 



More game is now killed at two hundred yards and 

 over than was formerly killed at that point. But this 

 is not because of any improvement or discovery in 

 distant shooting, but because game is scarcer and 

 wilder, and more chances must be taken, and because 

 the ease of loading the breech-loader and procuring 

 its ammunition makes people more liberal in expend- 



