AIDS TO SHOOTING 449 



whereabouts, distance or direction must often be 

 guessed at, there is no time at all. The writers on 

 shooting of many years ago laid undue stress on snap 

 shooting, and their books seem to urge the sportsman 

 just entering his novitiate to get his gun off first and 

 learn how to aim at his game last. This, of course, 

 makes a quick shot, but in these days, unless one shoots 

 constantly at the traps, the opportunities for practicing 

 shooting are so very few that a man might live beyond 

 the allotted three score years and ten without ever 

 shooting at birds enough to learn how to hit anything. 



I believe the way to learn the fundamentals of shoot- 

 ing is to practice with an empty gun until you have 

 learned to throw the gun up in the line of sight; in 

 other words, make your body handle your gun mechan- 

 ically, so that when you put it to your shoulder it will 

 point in the direction in which you are looking. If 

 you can do that you will have advanced far on the road 

 toward making yourself a good shot. 



In open shooting there is usually abundant time to 

 take aim. If the bird gets up anywhere near you, you 

 have time enough to fire both barrels at him and then 

 to stand and watch him for a second or two before 

 he is out of range. Now, if you had given one-quarter 

 of a second more to the effort to secure a good aim 

 on each of these shots you probably would have killed 

 the bird with the first or second barrel, instead of en- 

 during the mortification of a miss. The operations of 

 throwing the gun to the shoulder and pulling the trig- 

 ger take very little time, and although the bird appears 



