Even when they are not glaring over a traphouse I am not completely at ease with shotgun champions, for they have something I have not and cannot really understand.
There is the alert relaxation between shots, and if their palms sweat and their knees quiver I cannot see it. Then, there is that moment when the point of concentration is almost visible, sizzling steadily over the traphouse, and one of them calls "Pull!" in such a way that the target is not only commanded to appear but ordered to shatter, all in one word.
And when one of them misses I cannot believe it is a human miss but something mechanical such as defective pattern or a target that is overly hard. Although I speak of trapshooting there is much the same in skeet, simply not so easily observed.
There are hunters who can appease their egos with the statement that target shooters are no good on game, but this is seldom true and it has given me no satisfaction. Then we rigged this Crazy Quail setup.
Now we didn't have the trapshooters in mind at the time. We just wanted to miss fewer birds, and this fiendish pit with the revolving trap seemed a good idea. The good thing about Crazy Quail was that the rules were just suggested and everybody was doing a little extemporizing. You can find these pits around quite a few gun clubs, but a lot of them have fallen into disuse because you can't stop shotgunners from keeping score.
It's just a hole in the ground with a trap rigged on a turntable so that a sadist can sit on a seat and fire clay pigeons at any angle from the ground and in any direction. We fixed ours so you could keep the targets very low except on the side where the victim stands with his shotgun. You have to keep a high shield there for protection of the trap operator.
At first we thought it was just for accident prevention, but later we saw its merit as a crime deterrent. By the time a gunner ran around that shield he would have thought better of shooting the trap boy.
Now with our rules you'd call for the target with the gunstock below your elbow. We had quite a discussion about the distance from shooter to trap, and you must remember that the targets come toward the shooter as well as away from him and our rule was that he couldn't move his feet and take them behind his position. We considered 25 yards, but somebody envisioned a rifle-bored trap gun with one of those cold-eyed target smokers taking his time and ruining the whole show.
But we had to place the shooters back some to keep the skeet guns honest, so we settled on 16 yards. One of the natural features that helped was a stand of oaks and slash pine off to the left. They seemed to swallow any target that went that way--really tough visibility--but Buddy said a swamp quail doesn't carry any taillight either and it would be good practice.
Now if the guy in the pit made mental notes on each shot he'd quickly learn what your tough angles were. If the targets smoked when you hit them he'd figure you had a tightly bored gun and he'd tear you up with close ones. If you took them quickly he'd guess your gun was open and he'd fire most of them nearly straight away at a low angle to get them out of range fast. Then, there's the gimmick of establishing a pattern until the shooter begins to second-guess the trap and he's really psyched.
But the main gimmick of our setup was the juvenile delinquents who began to hang around--some teenagers who had nothing to unlearn, shot well themselves, and could be happy for days after making a fool of a man with a $2,000 shotgun, preferably a man with straight-run patches on his shooting jacket.
They quickly learned the tricks--the target with a hole punched in the center so it would drop fast--the daisy-cutter that barely cleared the pit edge--the funny noises that sounded like the trap but weren't.
Anyway, a bunch of good shots came over and got their nerves shaken. There was one who threw his new trap gun on the ground, and there was one who slid his Krieghoff into his car and muttered that he not only couldn't hit the damned things but that his match shooting would be ruined for the next weekend.
But the one I remember was the poor soul who studied the setup carefully and had done better than average. He not only had the skeet champion's cool eye but he had the birdshooter's quick and easy swing, and he was bent on 10 straight. It looked as if he might be well ahead of the young rascal in the pit. He crouched a little and his left hand held the fore-end lightly. Now he made one dry run, the polished walnut jumping to his cheek in a flowing move, and then he lowered it and called "Pull!"
There came a nerve-shattering thump as his unseen tormentor kicked the sheet-iron pit wall. He started just a little but smiled tautly and waited. It had been too long, so he called "Pull!" again. And when he saw nothing he called "Pull!" a third time testily, and finally he saw a coal-black, unpainted target disappear in the black shadows beneath the darkest pine.
Then came a muffled, boyish voice from the pit, quivering on the edge of derisive laughter.
"Mister, I done one it twice and you ain't seen it yet!"
This story originally appeared in The Part I Remember by Charles Waterman.
Copyright (c) 1974 by Charles F. Waterman. All Rights Reserved.
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