Forest and Stream 
RIFLE PRACTICE FOR HUNTERS 
NEXT TO SHOOTING AT NATURAL OBJECTS, RAPID-FIRE OFF¬ 
HAND WORK AT PAPER TARGETS IS OF THE MOST BENEFIT 
S EVERAL years ago, a companion 
and myself worked out one of the 
most successful and also one of the 
most practical forms of target prac¬ 
tice for field shooting that the writer has 
seen in action. It was as simple as pos¬ 
sible, required no markers or assistants, 
and yet, in spite of the fact that it was 
done more as a practical joke than as a 
means of instruction, results were so 
startling to the victim, who was unac¬ 
quainted with the methods previously 
employed to get results, that the telling 
of it may be the means of starting some¬ 
one on the road to better rifle shooting 
in the field. 
My shooting friend had a neighbor 
who, in spite of the fact that he was a 
fairly well-to-do farmer, had a good 
deal more thrift in his make-up than is 
found in the average Scotchman’s sys¬ 
tem. Consequently, he never could be 
induced to do any target practice pre¬ 
vious to the big-game hunting season, 
because he thought it was not only 
wasteful, but also sinful to shoot his 
money away in this manner. On more 
than one occasion he had missed a par¬ 
ticularly easy shot or two at deer, due 
entirely to the fact that he had no idea 
whatever where his bullets would strike 
at any other than absolutely point-blank 
range which, with his .38-55 black pow¬ 
der rifle, was little more than 50 yards. 
The result of all this was that he was 
rather discouraged about his shooting 
ability and it was becoming increasingly 
difficult to induce him to go deer hunt¬ 
ing for more than a day or two at a 
time, and this, too, regardless of the fact 
that he was undoubtedly one of the best 
trackers and all-day hunters in the 
whole neighborhood. 
We had a little shanty in a ravine 
back of the house, where we did our 
cartridge loading and kept our rifles and 
ammunition, from which we did our tar¬ 
get practice. Two hundred, three hun¬ 
dred, and five hundred yards directly up 
the hollow from the shanty were regular 
target butts for the usual long-range 
target practice. On each side of the 
ravine, however, were very steep and 
stony hills upon which we could secure 
the grandest off-hand practice imagi¬ 
nable with high-power rifles by shooting 
at stones or clods of dirt that were stood 
up so as to break and throw up dust 
each time they were hit. 
'"THE first day on the grounds we 
*■ spent in loading and in sorting over 
our ammunition, putting on a new sight 
or two and carefully targetting in a 
number of rifles: a sporting Springfield, 
a Ross, a .405 and a .250-3000. All of 
this required a bit of shooting at the 
various ranges and consequently we did 
quite a bit of firing. That evening my 
By C. S. LANDIS 
The result of ten shots, rapid-fire, offhand 
at 50 yards with a sporting Springfield 
friend went up to call on his super- 
economical neighbor and told him that 
there was a darn fool from the city 
down at his house who didn’t care how 
much ammunition he wasted, and who 
was going to shoot the next day until he 
had broken every rock within 500 yards 
of the shanty (which would have taken 
a week of steady shooting) because he 
was a trifle out of practice. 
This immediately got a rise out of 
“Hal,” as we had hoped that it would, 
as his misses had been aggravating to 
the rest of the camp, and he was on 
hand bright and early to do a bit of 
missionary work with one of the 
“Heathen” from the city. 
The first thing to do was to set up 
additional targets; so we made a circle 
around all of the hills within 400 yards 
of the cabin, and set up dozens of flat 
pieces of sandstone and shale, and 
propped them on end with sticks so that 
they would present flat or irregular sur¬ 
faces toward the firing point at the 
cabin. Some of these were placed in 
little open spaces in the chestnut woods, 
others were partly hidden in the ankle- 
high grass in a clover field, a few were 
placed against the butts of small pine 
and spruce trees and still more were 
scattered around in an apple orchard. 
In other words, these marks were lo¬ 
cated at unknown ranges, amid all kinds 
of surroundings, and at every point of 
the compass—except toward the house 
and road—so that actual field shooting 
conditions would be imitated. 
When viewed from the firing line no 
two marks looked alike or contrasted 
the same with their surroundings. Some 
of them could scarcely be seen at all, 
while a few stood right out in the open 
—the way artists like to draw a deer— 
where they could be seen more easily. 
And then the fun began. The white, 
yellow and red rocks that were close in 
and easy to see only lasted for a few 
minutes, but as soon as the hill was 
cleared up to the base of the clover field, 
the shooting took on a different charac¬ 
ter. Sometimes it was necessary to aim 
several times at a little black stone that 
looked like a woodchuck’s head 225 yards 
off in the clover field, before it was pos¬ 
sible to let off the Springfield ahead of 
the reappearance of the dot from behind 
the big yellow-bead front sight. It took 
four shots to get that one—although the 
rock had two other holes in it. 
The real hard marks were the black, 
green and brown stones that were hid¬ 
den in the brush and the “pieces” left 
from previous breaks that were classed 
as “cripples,” and which were not 
scored until fully broken. 
Probably the hardest shot of all was 
at a little gray stone about the size of 
one’s hand that nestled at the base of a 
pine scrub—clear up near the top of the 
highest hill. It took a long time to get 
a good hold on that stone because it was 
necessary to aim at the pine and then 
depress the muzzle slowly until the dot 
was centered behind the yellow bead— 
but when the white dust spurted a foot 
high off the dot, at the first shot, and a 
yard high at the second, which smashed 
the stone into powder, even “Hal” woke 
up with a yell. 
This, to him, was a new—and prac¬ 
tical—form of target shooting that 
meant far more than shooting at a paper 
target. Even he could see the similarity 
between that dot under the pine, and a 
woodchuck working down in his clover 
field; or between that yellow slab over 
in the chestnut woods and a deer sneak¬ 
ing back around the drivers. The marks 
looked “real.” He knew they were hard 
to hit, and every time the pieces flew or 
a spurt of dust shot up into the air, he 
could visualize what a shot like that 
would do to the old six-prong buck that 
he had missed the year before out back 
of his house on Locust Ridge. And one 
of those <fark rocks over in the apple 
orchard looked very much like the stern 
of that spike buck that had sneaked 
down through the hollow from Muncy 
Mountain and then beat it up to the 
cover of the ridges on the other side. 
That row of stones stuck up along the 
foot of a grown-up fence row and which 
were so hard to smash-—because they 
were hard to aim at—reminded him of 
the time a flock of turkeys were feeding 
over in the hollow back of the Under¬ 
wood Road and he never could under¬ 
stand why he couldn’t see to hit them 
because he was using a black front sight 
that showed up as big as a barn when 
he looked at it against a knot of his 
house (which was painted white). 
There were a dozen things that “Hal” 
perceived, but a number of others were 
(Continued on page 96) 
