602 
whether under or over the targets; but a begin¬ 
ner would be hopelessly at sea under similar con¬ 
ditions. 
An excellent plan for a beginner to adopt 
with reference to getting a gun to suit him, it 
to try any gun about the right length of stock 
(this based, as stated before, on his length of 
arm) that his friends will loan him temporarily 
for such trial. Sooner or later he will find one 
with which he can do better than with others, 
and thus has a basis to go on. Sometimes a be¬ 
ginner picks cne up that happens to be just right, 
and the trick is more than half turned. 
Another pointer for the beginner to remembef 
is to have no hesitation in asking the advice of 
an expert, particularly one of the expert pro¬ 
fessionals, for the latter are always expected 
and indeed are glad to give advice on just such 
points, and any suggestions they may have to of¬ 
fer will be found as a rule to be of much ben¬ 
efit. 
Any good field shot should with but little prac¬ 
tice make a first-class trap shot. The thing that 
bothers him at first is the idea of holding the 
gun right up or close to the shoulder when call¬ 
ing "Pull.” It is unnatural to him, and at first 
probably strikes him as unsportsmanlike. He 
tries the up-to-the-shoulder game and finding it 
a new and strained position to him, fails miser¬ 
ably instead of ‘‘breaking them all,” which he 
had expected to find a simple operation, as it 
looks so easy. He then reverts to the gun-be- 
low-the elbow (field style), and the targets get 
away from him so fast he has to hurry up to 
catch them, which he does not do in a very large 
percentage of instances. Unless such a man has 
grit and determination to find out how it is done 
he quits right there, and a good man is lost to 
the sport of trap shooting. 
The field shot will find another thing, too, and 
that is that an exact duplicate of his old favor¬ 
ite in the field will not be just what he wants. 
If he is a good quail (Virginia partridge) shot, 
ten to one he uses a fairly straight stock. That 
will be O. K. as a guide for his trap gun; but he 
can use a linger stock on his trap gun to good 
advantage and should bear this in mind when or¬ 
dering his gun. It will benefit him in assisting 
to take up the recoil, and as he can adjust his 
FOREST AND STREAM 
gun before calling “Pull," it will not catch un¬ 
der his arm and bother him, as it would if he 
were shooting in the gun-below-the-elbow or 
field style. 
Ammunition. 
This subject can be dismissed in but a few 
words. The scores made by experts show con¬ 
clusively the class of article now being put on 
the market by all the standard loading compa¬ 
nies. The shells manufactured by any and all 
of these companies, and loaded with one or othc. 
of the brands of smokeless shotgun powder are 
good enough to tie to under any conditions of 
wind or weather. 
The novice, i. e., the beginner, should guard 
against using too heavy a load. Heavy loads 
cause correspondingly heavy recoil, and recoil 
not only causes sore shoulders, but frequently 
severe headaches and consequent gun shyness on 
the part of the beginner. Select and stick to, 
for the first few months at least, a load of three 
drams of a “bulk” powder, or 24 grains of a 
“dense” powder, with either an ounce and an 
eighth or an ounce and a quarter of shot. The 
ounce and an eighth load is fast and snappy, 
and is extremely pleasant to shoot. When order¬ 
ing your trap loads, be sure and specify “chilled” 
shot, for if you use soft shot you will find you 
lose from 30 to 50 per cent, of your pattern. 
Shoot With Both Eves Open. 
Use both eyes; you need them both, and some¬ 
times you will wish you had a third—the clay 
targets will steal out and get away from you 
somehow. 
“Keep both eyes open” is a rule that must be 
adhered to, if success is to attend your efforts 
to become an expert at the traps. This rule 
should be strongly impressed upon every begin¬ 
ner, for the natural impulse is perhaps exactly 
the opposite, namely, to close one eye. Try it 
for yourself: Take a walking cane or a stick 
of wood and pretend that it is a gun; select some 
object to aim at, fix both eyes on the object and 
throw the stick to your shoulder as you would 
a gun. Don’t you then close one eye and in¬ 
stinctively look along the stick to see if you 
pointed right? To be sure you do. And wasn’t 
the stick pointing just right, too? 
Shooting Glasses. 
If your eyes do not seem to focus well, or if 
you are not quite sure as to which eye of the two 
is the stronger, do not delay, but go to an oculist 
and let him tell what, if anything, is wrong. If 
necessary have glasses made to correct any de¬ 
fect, but above all, when having such glasses 
made for you, be sure to have them large enough, 
so that when your cheek is down on the stock 
and your eye is looking along the rib, you will 
not be looking over the top of the glasses. 
Special shooting glasses are made by several 
concerns found in our advertisement pages, and 
lenses suitable to any kind of freak sight can be 
had of several different colors—green, orange, 
pale blue, etc. The popular color among trap 
shooters seems to be on the order of an amber, 
and plain glasses of that color made for ordi¬ 
nary sight or according to some special formula 
are much worn and certainly do help to kill the 
glare, light on the gun barrel, etc. Their use i* 
decidedly beneficial when the sun is exceptionally 
bright and there is snow on the ground, or when 
shooting over water. 
How To Locate The Right Spot. 
Opinions differ somewhat as to whether tar¬ 
gets shot at by beginners are more often lost by 
being “shot under” than by being ‘‘shot over”; 
that is, whether the shot goes under or over the 
targets that are missed. Observation seems to 
warrant the claim that far more targets are lost 
by novices through over shooting than by under 
shooting, disregarding for the present the ques¬ 
tion of “lead” (i. e., the proper distance to hold 
ahead of a target), which will be touched on 
later. 
The reason for such a claim is this: The nov¬ 
ice does not appreciate the fact that owing to 
the straight stock on his gun he should see his 
target well above the gun barrel; that is, look 
(and consequently point the gun) at some imag¬ 
inary point below the target. If he shoots 
quickly, the target should as a rule be just clear 
of the barrel; if he is a slow shot, the imag¬ 
inary point will have to be considerably lowr*-, 
for by the time the shot gets out to the target 
the object aimed at will have passed the apex 
of its flight and have commenced to drop. 
