March, 1923 
113 
GUN PRACTICE FOR FIELD WORK 
ONE SHOULD CHOOSE THE SHOTS WHICH ALWAYS 
TROUBLE HIM AND LEARN TO HANDLE THEM EFFECTIVELY 
By C. S. LANDIS 
I 
T HIS article is not, as might be 
supposed a dissertation upon the 
positive or negative advantages 
of standard clay-target shooting 
as a preliminary practice for field shoot¬ 
ing. Neither is it a discussion of tin- 
can shooting with which everyone is 
more or less familiar and which seems 
to have an established place on the 
shooting program of nearly all hunters. 
It is, on the other hand, a resume of 
practice and preparation that seem to 
add tremendously at times to the success 
of almost anyone who goes hunting. 
It is conceivable and will probably be 
admitted without much argument, that 
in the hunting field the “easy" but un¬ 
expected chances are the ones that 
usually are the most frequently missed. 
Why this is so, seems to be one of those 
apparently unexplainable problems that 
bob up occasionally to plague us all. 
And yet there must be some practical 
solution. 
The clean miss with both barrels in 
flock shooting at quail probably heads 
the list as being the most exasperating 
and humiliating experience that befalls 
the bird hunter. And yet, if we think 
back far enough, most of us can recall 
incidents where we have fallen down 
time after time on a shot 
of this kind, only to keep 
on and kill a nice bag of 
game by kicking up singles. 
The misses are usually 
put down to an attack of 
“buck fever" or of shoot¬ 
ing without aiming. We let 
it go at that and the next 
time it’s the same old story. 
Sometimes there’s an¬ 
other reason: It is that the 
gun does not shoot to center 
on a snap-shot. Possibly it 
shoots too high or off to one 
side. This doesn’t mean an 
inch or two—-but a foot or 
two—quite enough to cause 
certain misses at close 
ranges like 10 to 20 yards. 
I know a man who missed 
six consecutive shots at 
whole covies of quail and 
then in disgust went and 
patterned his gun on a couple of boards 
and found that he invariably overshot 
the mark by nearly a foot at 20 yards. 
On singles, where he aimed more 
deliberately and was more careful to 
keep that straightaway quail in view -— 
he unconsciously aimed lower and nat¬ 
urally he usually got his bird. 
It is the same story in squirrel shoot¬ 
ing. At 40 yards you wouldn’t think 
anyone could miss a sitting gray squirrel 
which presents a mark of probably 2x4 
inches. Try shooting ten patterns at 2 x 
4 inch rectangles at 20 to 40 yards and 
see how many of them will be centered. 
Not more than half unless you know 
considerably more about where your 
shotgun places its pattern than do most 
people. 
Here’s another little fooler that will 
explain why a rabbit is able so frequent¬ 
ly to run past a line of hunters without 
being touched. 
Have a friend go with you to a bare, 
grassy hillside and then have him throw 
or roll flat stones or rocks down in front 
of you, at unexpected times. Shoot only 
when the rocks are rolling and bouncing 
their fastest and see how many you 
shoot behind or over. Consider then 
what would have happened had you 
been shooting at a rabbit which would 
doubtless have startled you when it first 
got up, and which would have been 
traveling at least two or three times as 
fast when you shot at it. 
Here’s another test that will probably 
surprise some hunters: Walk alortg a 
swiftly moving stream some spring 
when the ice is going out. The current 
is probably moving six or seven miles 
per hour if the water is very high, and 
you let fly at a cake of ice sixty or 
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Working out difficult angles at the traps 
seventy yards away; you shot two feet 
behind and a foot low, didn’t you ? Had 
it been a mallard flying ten times as 
fast you would have shot twenty feet 
behind —and a foot lozv. The foot low 
explains why some of us miss both the 
leader and the rear guard when we 
shoot at the head of the flock. 
Probably the prize hard shot of all is 
the dove that suddenly appears from no¬ 
where and when first seen is ten feet 
above the shooter’s face and going like 
a bullet. Missed it, didn’t you ? Sure 
you did—unless it was an accidental hit. 
Ever try a regular course of shooting 
at flat stones, blue rocks or walnuts 
that some other shooter threw just as 
hard as he could—right past your head ? 
It's a bit strenuous and you won’t get 
any long runs but after a while you’ll 
probably hit one or two. If you do you 
won’t aim where you did when you first 
started shooting. 
"PHERE are two more or less widely- 
separated classes of shotguns suit¬ 
able for hunting. The one is the heavy, 
close-shooting, double or repeater that 
has considerable drop to the stock. It 
almost invariably shoots exactly to cen¬ 
ter at 40 yards. Long-range shots at 
squirrels, crows, hawks, ducks or geese 
that are stationary when shot at, are 
dead easy with a weapon of this kind. 
You get them nearly every time. 
But try the stunt of shooting squirrels 
with a real quail, grouse or trap gun 
that is of necessity bored to shoot six 
inches or a foot high. It is almost im¬ 
possible to kill consistently with it on 
such shots. The reason is that it is so 
very difficult to remember exactly how 
high it shoots at the different ranges. 
I have such a gun. Have 
shot it very successfully on 
quail, rabbits, and grouse 
for ten years, but on squir¬ 
rels if I get more than one 
out of three with it, Pm 
lucky. And that isn’t be¬ 
cause it doesn’t shoot close 
enough. It is simply be¬ 
cause it shoots the pattern 
some other place than 
where it is aimed. With 
the same gun, however, I 
make fully twice as many 
kills on the hardest kind of 
close-range snap-shots at 
quail and rabbits than I 
ever previously made with 
any other shotgun. 
This is a good example 
of a weapon that is almost 
perfect for one style of field 
shooting and a total failure 
for another. 
Of all the hard shots in the field to 
practice for, that of a dove suddenly 
dropping down to alight is probably the 
most impossible. A falling can moves 
like a slow freight compared to a dove 
under these circumstances. So also does 
a baseball or a “goonie” thrown rather 
high and directly toward the shooter 
from a distance of 75 or 100 yards. 
I never saw anyone who was even a 
reasonably good shot on this kind of a 
chance at doves and doubt if I ever 
will, unless some system is invented that 
(Continued on page 138) 
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