Drive - A Memoir 92nd Installment
at
49/50!”
“Oh,
shut up. You got the 49/50 at night, spotlighting, in the winter,
sitting shots, with no shot over twenty-five feet!” I retorted.
“Today is open field daytime shooting; the kind of shooting that
mostly requires running shots.”
“I
accept the challenge” Victor announced. No one spoke again for
about a mile of walking. We had seen some jack rabbits while walking,
even some decent shots, but with the ‘challenge,’ we all wanted
to arrive at the same place, start at the same time and figure out
some rules.
I
decided to ease the stress with a joke, “One day the sheriff got a
call from a guy who said, ‘my friend has been shot; what should I
do?’ The sheriff said “Did you check to see if he’s dead?”
Then the sheriff heard a gunshot over the phone and shortly the guy’s
voice saying, “He’s dead.”
Wow,
I
thought,
tough crowd; no one laughed.
“Okay,
let’s start at this point; here’s the rules,” Russ took charge.
“We take turns, stay in a group starting oldest down. In turn, you
take what you are given, easy or hard, luck of the draw. You shoot
once unless there are two or more jack rabbits to shoot in your turn.
No one talks or distracts the shooter in any way, and no one moves to
scare the jack rabbit, Casey,” He mentioned my name because he
knows me. I was thinking this would never work, anyway, because three
hunters, trying for fifty jack rabbits each, would be around a
hundred and fifty jack rabbits, and we weren’t going to see that
many in the daytime, in the open, and in the summer. “At 3:30 this
afternoon we stop, and the highest ratio wins,” Russ completed the
rules.
Okay,
this would work – no more fiddling around, bad jokes or complaints.
This had turned out to be serious work. The first few minutes were
predictable, Russ’s first shot hit a fifty foot sitter; Victor
stopped a jack rabbit a little further out. My target was fairly
close; thirty feet, but running slow broadside. Running straight away
makes for a difficult small target, but, slow broadside is about as
easy as a sitting shot. Three for three – so far so good! I was
going to mentally keep score. Russ got a slow broadside floater, then
Victor got a hit, and I noticed a bullet in his teeth. Strange.
My
turn, good news, ‘a two-fer.’ The first jack rabbit was easy; one
down, and the second bolted, but I was ready. My trusty automatic was
reloaded, and I prepared to take the lead. Then the jack rabbit
turned into some tall weeds and grass. I waited. Suddenly out came
the jack rabbit, dead run straight away; I fired a miss. Frustration
clouded good sense, and I shot again – Sadly, I was a .500 in 2
seconds. I’d hit two
500 more words tomorrow
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