Most of us suffer from the inner conviction that we ought to be better shotgunners than we are. This is a corrosive agony; it causes us to roll our eyes heavenward and ask what evil lurks in our synapses and ganglia that forces us to lift our head from the stock and shoot high, or fire at an angling target as though it were a straightaway.

If there were a great and all-knowing Seer of Shotgunning, you could seek him on his mountaintop and ask, "Why do I hit the hard targets and miss the easy ones?" And he would answer, "Son, there are no easy ones."

If you were to press the matter, he would reveal that there are several immutable laws of shotgunning. They are sacred, and if you violate them you will be punished. The punishment is called "missing."

The first law is that you do not call for a target until you're ready--really ready--to go after it.

Rule number two states that there is no such thing as a round of trap or skeet or sporting clays╤there is only one target at a time. There is no history and no future, just the present. If you dwell on how quickly and surely you have dealt with the past 99 birds, you will miss the 100th. All that counts is what you do now, on this one.

Rule number three is one of the hardest to obey and is, perhaps, the one that truly separates the first-rate shot from the ruck. It says: you must want to break the next one. Not wish, not hope, but want. Be aggressive and positive and determined. This is not easy to do when you're tired, nervous, and doubtful, and there are a hundred things to distract you, but remember that the same forces are working on everyone else.

You may not agree with rule four, which says that whatever you do, do quickly, but bear with me a moment. Trying to be too sure, too exact, will lead to a miss. There comes a time when the body must take over from the mind, and that is when your gun comes up. The superb shot is always the quick shot; not necessarily a bolt of lightning, but a person who knows when to pull the trigger and does it at that instant.

Rule number four also holds that if you are afraid to miss, you will miss. Fear of missing makes you too careful or too sloppy. We all know that we'll miss some of them; the trick is to accept this and not let missing feed on itself.

If you've ever shot trap, you've seen this at work. One member of a squad will miss. The next shooter, seeing this, thinks I'd better really bear down or I'll miss, too. And naturally he misses, and the contagion spreads down the line.

Beginning trapshooters usually do better at doubles than singles. They know they're expected to miss some, so they relax, and shoot a little quicker and a little straighter.

Rule number five says that lack of a proper gun mount can undo anyone. At trap and American skeet, where you shoot with the gun shouldered, this is not vital, but at sporting clays or in the field, rule five holds with a vengeance. If there is a single leading cause of mysterious misses, it is the lack of barrels aligned beneath the eye and the gun butt placed high on the shoulder. If you've ever seen a good target shot perform poorly in the field it is probably because he can do everything but get the gun to his shoulder correctly.

The way to live under rule five is to practice. Lord Ripon, a 19th-century Briton, was probably the most notable field shot his country ever produced...and he was famous as well for the hours and hours he spent practicing his gun mount.

And finally, our Seer of Shotgunning would say, we must acknowledge that although there is much science in what we do, much of it is comprised of intangibles, and so I'll close with a quote from the great humorist James Thurber: "It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed. But I have discharged my duty to society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him."