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 
