FOREST AND STREAM 
749 
and he will make no mistake if early in the game 
he ties up to one brand and one load for he 
will always know where he is at in that particu¬ 
lar and just how much it will spring his arms. 
Far and away the most men use a bulk powder. 
To me it is more fragrant, more wholesome to 
inhale and I like to remember the three dram 
load of the brand I use holds the world’s record 
at the extreme distance! surely it is good enough 
for me at sixteen yards. 
Unless you are unlike the most of us you 
drifted into the game among your acquaintances, 
your friends, who did all they could to help you 
along and you have lost no time in learning 
about the different money divisions, systems of 
handicapping and methods of awarding prizes. 
Pay most of your attention to learning to handle 
yourself in a squad, for there comes a time when 
you go to a strange far off place to cross guns 
for valuable prizes and while your guests will do 
everything in reason for you the Interstate As¬ 
sociation rules will be enforced to the last letter. 
The jokes and laughter of the moments before 
the program starts will not be carried to the 
score. You feel that intense tingling sensation 
that affects you when the last ball game of the 
series is about to begin but now it is intensified 
a hundred fold, for you are to be a contestant 
and perhaps you will be Queen of the May and 
your name will appear in the Village Gimlet as 
the man who annexed the tallest silver joram. 
It may develop later on that it is quadruple plate, 
but at the moment it will surely be sterling and 
very heavy for its size. If it should prove 
otherwise later we need say nothing about it. 
Enter your name for the full program at once, 
for the earlier you get started the earlier you 
get through. By so doing you will get into bet¬ 
ter squads and save a lot of fretting and wait¬ 
ing at the very end of the day. I have noticed 
the majority of men watch their squad mates 
break or lose their targets. I believe there is 
much to be said in keeping your eyes off the for¬ 
tunes of the rest of the squad. Through chance 
the last three birds thrown may all be right 
angles and in spite of all you can do you look 
for your target in the same place, yet you are 
scared to death lest it be a fast left quarter. If 
you had kept your eyes off all those targets you 
would be looking for the target anywhere and 
be properly keyed to the necessity of landing on 
it. There will be plenty of opportunity to watch 
others in action during the long waits for your 
squad to be called again. 
With all the queer look of things you can de¬ 
pend on this; if you are used to shooting from a 
platform or higher elevation than the trap level 
you will need to hold higher on your targets 
when shooting from the ground, and, of course, 
hold lower when the conditions are reversed. In 
either event your gun should allow you to see 
your bird clear. Old hands at the game prefer 
to get their feet on Mother Earth but they size 
up these conditions in the first event, consequent¬ 
ly the scores of the seasoned ones suffer less 
than those of the new hand who will have to 
fish for his birds longer. Frequently a target 
taking a certain angle will baffie a shooter every 
time it shows up. It was not so long ago that a 
man was shooting in a state some distance from 
his usual stamping ground when a mild quarter¬ 
ing bird began to get away from him till it 
seemed as though every target he called for took 
the same dreaded course. Things went badly and 
at last he flinched terribly on one of these same 
targets. To his great surprise the target was 
blown out of the air. The mystery was explained. 
He eagerly waited for it to show up again and 
you may be sure it did the very next time when, 
holding higher than his judgment told him was 
necessary, the bird was cleanly cut down. The 
actor in the above sketch was the writer of this 
little article and confidence was restored to an 
extent that allowed him to carry off a beautiful 
silver cup, the first of a list of valuable prizes 
awarded on the last two events of the day. Sheer 
luck is not always at hand or so timely as it was 
in this instance and such a target must be fished 
for, although I admit it is very hard to do when 
you are pointing exactly right on a high per cent, 
of all the others. 
After you have taken away from this beauti¬ 
fully clean and refreshing sport such elements 
as the love of handling a beautiful weapon, the 
primitive glee of smashing something, the joy of 
good fellowship, there still stands preeminent the 
fact that in this sport almost alone a man must 
stand on his own legs. Neither friendship, poli¬ 
tics, nor creed can help a man once he stands 
alone on the position mark at the score. It is one 
little team of nerves, wits and the fibre of clean 
living against another, and victory or even a good 
showing brings an individual a very high de¬ 
gree of pleasure. Only three leaves have been 
torn from the calendar since a man dropped but 
one target out of five hundred. What a sight 
it must have been! How some of us look for¬ 
ward to attending some of the classics where 
such things come to pass. However these things 
may be, we are sure of the fact that we can go 
to the local gun club on any sunny afternoon, 
tired out with a hard day’s work and give our 
nerves such a complete change that perfect bal¬ 
ance is restored. Few will believe this scientific 
fact till they have tried and found that the truth 
rings true. 
A Convert to the Twenty-Eight Gauge 
From a wide experience of wing shooting— 
during about three decades, north, south, east 
and west and many interesting talks with sports¬ 
men, relative to the merits of different styles 
of shot guns, I have thought that a short letter 
on the practical experience recently, with the 
smallest bore shot gun, might prove of some in¬ 
terest to your readers, those who are fond of 
the greatest of all hunting sport, with the 
trusty bird dog—and a good gun. Up to very 
recently I was disposed to regard anything smal¬ 
ler than a 16 gauge gun as a popular fad, until 
a good friend put into my hands a pretty little 
28 gauge double barrel. I was quite out of hunt¬ 
ing trim, not having handled a gun for several 
years. My eyesight was rather questionable, ow¬ 
ing to the fact that I had recently decided to lay 
aside glasses and try the naked orbits again in 
brush shooting at the ruffed grouse, as I had 
often found the lenses a decided nuisance. 
I My first outing was to a favorable cover, for 
the birds, but not for the hunter. It was on 
1 
the side of a mountain where the climbing was 
difficult. I shot many holes in the air. I had 
forgotten how to shoot or the gun was not the 
kind, or both. One week later I swung off to a 
different territory with more level cover. The 
first opportunity to try the gun and gunner for 
that occasion, was on a nice covey of quail. I 
By Lucien C. De Hart. 
had concluded that as the gun was well choked 
and a small bore to boot, almost as much pre¬ 
cision was necessary as in rifle shooting. When 
the quail flushed the first bird up was selected 
as the target and killed with a quick crossing 
shot. As the birds flushed wild and rushed by 
me, a second bird was also killed and fell with¬ 
in fifteen or twenty feet of the first. Of course, 
I did not wish to count two scratches in such 
rapid succession and followed the birds. Out 
of seven shots I managed to bag five birds. 
The setter picked up a good trail and worked 
it out into a pasture, pointed in a small clump 
of birch and the bird arose to the left of my 
position and raced toward the side of the moun¬ 
tain six or eight rods away. As I turned com¬ 
pletely around the shot offered was a left cross¬ 
ing, at about thirty paces. The bird was fol¬ 
lowed for a fraction of a second, until the exact 
line of flight was gotten, then the gun was 
swung to about a two foot lead. At the crack 
of the gun the bird dropped its head, indicat¬ 
ing where connection was made, and dropped 
like a brick. As we started toward hunting 
quarters, the sun was just dropping behind the 
hills. A staunch point was made in a thicket 
6f tall birch. A woodcock flushed and swung 
off to the right. Just as soon as the side step 
had been executed a quick shot was made 
through the tree tops and dropped Mr. Timber- 
doodle in mid flight as the one and only mem¬ 
ber of his tribe seen this season. By that time 
I was simply fascinated with the 28 gauge. In 
reality is was about the best brush shooting of 
which I had ever been guilty. The record for a 
later hunt with the same gun was six birds 
bagged with eight shots, all in thick cover save 
one bird. Grouse shooting is essentially a thick 
cover sport, hence with only four and a half 
pounds of gun to handle it may be readily seen 
what enormous advantage is had in the scoring 
process. In my experience, and I am a very 
hard hunter, every ounce of extra gun metal 
lowers a man’s chances in the bagging stunt. 
In the thickets the little gun can be manipulated 
with as much ease as a well balanced walking 
cane. With a hunting coat pocket full of 28 
gauge shells—of 14 grain of infallible powder 
and five-eighth ounces of shot I caught myself 
repeatedly feeling for cartridges that I thought 
I had lost. In the many years of wing shoot¬ 
ing I have tried many guns, most of them excel¬ 
lent shooters of their type, but as I grow older 
and do not feel like lugging so much metal, I 
chance upon “a popular fad” with which I can 
tramp all day and not notice the weight, besides 
doing better shooting than during earlier pe¬ 
riods, with more of the strength of youth. 
