IN AN EFFORT to improve myself, to try to become worthy of this dog, I enrolled in a shooting school, so that I might stand a better chance of rewarding Colter with a dropped bird every now and then.
Like every hunter, I’ve occasionally wondered, after having believed—viscerally—that a bird would fall, only to see it keep on flying, fully feathered and unfazed, whether there wasn’t something wrong with the mechanics of the universe, rather than my shot, so perfect was my swing, my aim, my everything...
I finally cut through all that stuff though and accepted the truth that I am a really bad shot. Must we resort to the cruel ambiguities of enumeration? Will that satisfy you? Must I quantify my abasement?
I have shot a box of shells without hitting a quail before.
Well, you might say, those little buggers are fast, and everyone has his slumps.
No, I will say, gripping you by the shoulders, listen. I have shot a box of shells at pheasants before without hitting one.
I have made my peace with this condition; after much moral wrestling, I’ve succeeded in not defining my worth as a person by how well I shoot a shotgun.
I cannot explain this to Colter, however; and to be further truthful, my peace fades when I am with him, and he, through diligent effort and prodigious talent and desire-to-please—call it love—produces a bird, or birds, for me, and I fire and miss, again and again and again. The guilt, the regret returns.
None of us are worthy of our dogs. But we can try.
Six of us gathered at a beautiful hunting lodge in northern Montana on a glorious autumn day with fog like smoke among the soft humps of mountains—the larch needles red-gold, and the season’s first snow, early October, already high above us in the roadless country beyond. Steve Schultz, our teacher, was as careful and gentle with us as, say, a social worker or family counselor; we understood that he truly wanted to help, and yet nowhere was there any feeling of pressure to change.
After breakfast we suited up and left the dining room with its magnificent views and trudged out into the blowing mist and fog. Steve delivered a safety talk, starting out with simple, vital gun etiquette, but concluding—effectively, I might add—with stories about friends and acquaintances that had been shot by students. For the entire course Steve would hold all of our shells in his vest, and would hand them to us one at a time, or insert them into the tube of the breached gun himself, as we stood there on the platform with him.
His cadence, his demeanor, reminded me of my own feelings on the opening day of bird season each fall. All right, I’ll think, when I step out into the field for the first time, with Colter, in early September. The whole field, the whole season, lies before me. The thing I’ve been waiting for is finally here. You don’t want to rush into it. You want to hang back for a moment and watch the world sweep past for a few beats. You want to notice everything.
Steve is a muscular man of medium height, in his early fifties. He’s filled with aches and pains, shrapnel and scars, from Vietnam. He was once carried out in a black body bag, believed to be dead.
He asked us how far we think the pellets from a shotgun can travel and still be lethal. Our guesses clustered around the fifty-yard mark. One of us hazarded a guess of around a hundred yards. Steve told us that it’s more like eight or nine hundred yards. We were silent for a moment, staring out at the vast autumn meadow beyond us, and the wall of blue trees—spruce and fire, with the gold coins of aspen leaves intermixed—beyond that.
Steve described people he’s seen shot by shotguns: not in war, but while hunting. Crossing a fence, or swinging on a quail, or trudging out toward the goose decoys. It’s like a hole opens up inside them, he said. You’re looking right at them and suddenly you can see daylight coming through them.
After another long pause—long enough for the image of that daylight to settle down somewhere inside us, as if we too had seen it, and will henceforth be ever vigilant against seeing it again—we stepped up to the shooting platform to begin. The lodge has several shooting stations placed all across the grounds, so that you can practice any kind of shooting you want: from a ridge looking down, straightaway, falling, rising, crossing... The pullers took turns crouching in the freezing drizzle with rapidly cooling cups of coffee and went down into a blind to wait the calls of pull! I could see a tiny thread of blue cigarette smoke rising from the blind below us, and I felt like some elite capitalist pig, playing up top while the yeoman labors below.
Anything for Colter.
Amazingly, we all shot about the same. Pretty piss-poor—about one- or two- or maybe three-for-twenty. (The three-for-twenties got bragged on and praised by us, though Steve just watched, watched. Personally I was thrilled, amazed, relieved that I nicked anything—a single pellet chipping the clay pigeon now and again. There’s something so absolute and empty about the number zero.
“Good,” Steve said, with true satisfaction, when the last of us had finished shooting, whiffing, poking, flailing. “You’re all rifle shooters, not shotgunners.” By which he meant that we were pointing and stabbing at the thing. And always, always shooting behind it, because it was moving.
He must love a challenge. It has gotten so easy for Steve to hit a clay pigeon—shooting left-handed, right-handed, upside-down—that the only serious challenge now was trying to get someone else to hit one. Trying to hit one no-handed, as it were—with both hands tied behind his back.
“Most of the birds you have killed in your life,” he said, “have been by mistake.” Pause. “That bird was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Pause. “An accident.”
He proceeded to explain to us about the sight at the end of our barrels—the “miss-me bead.” He demonstrated how, if you’re looking at that bead, you’re going to miss. He asked us to point a finger at a distant fence post and keep our eye on that fence post.
“Now,” he said, “what happens when you look at the tip of your finger?”
The fence post disappeared, like magic. The bird flew away, in the time the eye spent refocusing on the tip of the finger, or the miss-me bead.
“So why do they put these beads on the ends of the barrel in the first place?” someone asked.
Steve pointed to the cap he was wearing, with the name “Federal” on it—the company he works for, the company that’s helping sponsor our class. “So we can sell you lots of shotgun shells,” he said.
Steve gave us an exercise, only one exercise, to do when we got back home: to practice mounting the gun in front of a mirror and looking down the rib, the spine, so that in the mirror all we can see is our eye, our one eye, at the other end of that same barrel. He said to do it slowly, smoothly, twenty-five times a day—not to build strength, but memory.
“It’s the little things that get you,” he said, meaning the tiny, initial inaccuracies that conspire to make you miss. If you take care of the basics, you will not miss. He guaranteed it—you will not miss—and we laughed nervously, not believing him, but understanding also that he was not conning us.
“Snug the gun up tight to the face,” he said, showing us how to get a good mount. “Then look right down that rib. If you’re wrong there—if you don’t have the butt of the gun tight to your cheek, and if you’re not sighting right down the rib—well, there’s no telling where the shot string will go. You might be able to see the bird and it might appear to you that you’re in the ballpark, that you’ve got a chance—but, depending on the distance, you’ll probably be fifteen or twenty feet off—usually behind.”
Steve showed us how to align the index finger of our left hand along the rib of the gun, so that when we swing the gun, we will literally be pointing that finger at the bird when we shoot. He asked how many of us had ever been driving down the road and seen a dove go flying past and pointed our pistol finger at it, as if to shoot.
Everyone except a woman named Kathy, who had never held a gun before, raised their hands.
“And you always get it, right?” Steve asked. “No one ever says, ‘Ah, dang it, I was behind that one.’ Trust me,” he said, waggling his finger at us, “your hand’s going to try to make you happy.”
He said that the wiring is already in us to intercept that bird, and the only way to miss is if you do something to short-circuit that wiring. He was not giving us a New Age pep talk but explaining the marvels of physiology and neurobiology. The mind is like a computer, and as you’re watching the bird’s flight, if you allow your body to “watch” the bird, and don’t do anything to disrupt that “watching”—stopping to squint at a bead at the end of your barrel, for instance, or cocking your head at some loose and goofy angle against the gun butt—well, then, your body will try to connect—will connect to where your eyes are searching. You don’t have to go to school to learn this: it’s already within us, after a hundred thousand years of reaching, and grasping, connecting body to sight. As Steve explained this, I found myself remembering two quotes. In A Rough-Shooting Dog, Charles Fergus quotes white advice on the act of shooting: “Grasp the bird, venomously.”
And Thomas McIntyre, discussing the ideas of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “According to Gasset, animals thought of as game are not hunted by chance, but because in the instinctive depths of their natures, they have already foreseen the hunter (before he even enters the woods), and have, therefore, been shaped to be alert, suspicious, and evasive.” (Their shape, in turn, is what has molded our own—the wiring of our brains having been prepared for this pursuit.) And again according to the philosopher, the only adequate response to a being that lives obsessed with avoiding capture is to try to catch it.”
“All day long, I’m going to be telling you to shoot at that bird’s head,” Steve said. “I won’t be telling you to lead. Just try and shoot the bird in the head,” he said, “not the tail.”
This reminded me of something Tom said that has always bothered me. We were out duck hunting, and per usual, I was missing. Tom couldn’t figure it out. “Shoot when their wings are up,” he said, lifting both arms over his head to demonstrate duck flight, “not when their wings are down.” I stared at him, understanding clearly for the first time how different we were: how there was this thing inside him that was not inside me. Shoot when their wings are up, and their breasts exposed? It’s all just a bunch of splashing water and furious flapping, to me. Before that, I had kind of thought all people were pretty much the same.
Along these same lines, Steve spoke of being able to see the shot string itself—not the packing wad that is ejected behind the shot, but the string of tiny pellets themselves, swirling and shifting like a swarm of bees as they hurl at a thousand feet per second toward the quarry. “After each of your misses, ask yourself whether you were high or low, or behind, or some combination of the two. No one ever shoots ahead of a bird,” he said.
It took me about half a day—the full morning—to believe him. “You can see the bird’s eye,” he said. “Try and shoot at the eye.”
He told us how he shudders whenever anyone invites him over for a wild game dinner. All those shot pellets in the pheasant’s rear end.
Most people see that big old tail on a rooster, he said—it catches their eye—and they can’t help but shoot at that. Their body can’t say no to their eyes, so they shoot where they’re looking: at the tail. Sometimes they get lucky and just barely clip the pheasant in the butt.
“Always try to miss in front.” He showed us his trigger finger, then pointed to his head. When it’s time to pull the trigger, the finger will take care of it.
It is all about not messing up. “Make this gun do what the bird’s doing in flight,” he said, “and get a good mount” (against your cheek), “and the bird will die every time,” he said. “And shoot at the head.” If you do those three things—cheek-to-gun mount, look down the rib, and shoot at the head—you won’t miss.
“Point at the nose,” he said. “Drill him hard.” His words were quiet, almost hypnotizing, in the falling rain. Breath clouds rose from all of us, as if from animals in a stockyard.
He told us the three things again—mount snug, look down the rib, shoot at the head—as he would tell us a hundred, or maybe a thousand times. It’s why the exercises in the mirror are so important. Just those three things.
“If you add one thing, or leave one thing out, you’ll miss.”
And then he told us the most horrible truth of all. “You have got to get to the point where you don’t care if you hit the bird or not, but that you do the movement right.”
Not care if I get the bird? Not care if I deliver it to earth for my beloved dog?
“If you do the movement right”—anchor to cheek, look down the rib, shoot at the head—“the bird will die.”
We hit a few more pigeons on the next round. He stayed as calm and steady as ever, but I seemed to detect a spark beginning to glow in him—a warmth, a pleasure, made noticeable not by its pronouncement but rather by its restraint, and the absence of comment, when we struck a pigeon. Sometimes the slightest of smiles.
Kathy, the woman who’d never held a gun, struck one, fractured it spinning in four different directions, and laughed out loud.
Steve fed us the shells slowly, one at a time, reaching into his deep pockets: the yellows for the twenty gauges, the reds for the twelves. The Candy Man. Slowly, and then quickly, we became addicted. It was like falling into a dream, where there was only the gun, and the shooting, and the clay pigeons flying against the rainy sky: a waking dream, through repetition.
Finally we were ready to learn.
I wondered how many times he has seen it before.
As if frightened of this letting-go—the speed of it, and the foggy vaporousness of it—I tried instead to pull out of that zone and regain consciousness. Even as the memory of success was being developed, I struggled against it. It was so startling to see some of the pigeons breaking when I shot that I wanted to be more conscious, not accepting that the two words, conscious and aware, are perhaps for some things incompatible.
I purposefully took a step back from that wonderful feeling of submergence—a feeling like backing out of the deep end—and looked out at the gold and green forests of autumn, the snowy visage of the fog high in the mountains. It was almost as if I was scared of learning—or of not being in control of the learning. Scared of following it, rather than pulling it behind me like stones on a steel sled.
“It should be smooth and easy,” Steve said, as if reading my thoughts. “I used to do it hard. Now I do it easy. If you ain’t gettin’ paid for it, don’t turn it into a job.”
He meant I was rushing the gun to my cheek too fast, then stopping to think.
After every miss, he arched his eyebrow at the misser—a gesture that, we learned, meant Why’d you miss? And we had to be able to stop and answer. Poor mount. Behind. High. Low. Behind. Poor mount, behind, poor mount. Wasn’t looking down the rib of the barrel. Behind.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” he said. “You’ll be out in the field and miss, and you’ll need to ask yourself why—and you’ll need to be able to answer.”
If you have trouble dropping into that dreamland of vaporizing pigeon-dust, Steve can also give you the straight scoop—practical directions on how to get there. If you insist, as I kept doing, on thinking about it, instead of just pasting them.
Steve asked politely for a gun: demonstrated the smooth lift. It’s like he said: he wasn’t teaching us to hit the pigeons, he was teaching us the memory of the movement.
“Pretend you’re putting butter on bread—spread the barrel toward the bird.”
“Pretend you’re on TV and they’re filming you, and they can just see you shooting—they can’t see the bird. Swing real slow and easy like you’re on TV.”
“Pretend you’ve got a shot glass of Glenlivet on the end of that barrel, as you swing it. You know what happens if you spill Glenlivet?”
No, what?
“You go directly to hell.”
Slowly, steadily, the clay pigeons died. It seemed that Steve allowed himself just the tiniest bit of pleasure, as we began to improve, but again, perhaps not: there was still so much work to be done, so much to be taught, so much to be learned.
“Try and shoot out in front of the bird. Try and shoot too far in front of the bird, on purpose. You cannot do it. It is an impossibility. Your body will not let you do it.”
I struggled to prove him wrong. But the pigeons shattered, or vaporized. It was like a magic trick: as if he was demolishing them with some hidden remote control.
Sometime after lunch, the surprise of hitting one was replaced by the surprise of missing. We liked it. Slowly we were becoming addicted: craving our next turn in line; craving the next shell. Craving the next call, Pull. It became fun. Our muscles were learning, our memory. It was too easy.
By the middle of the second day, through the bonding of the shoot, if not the hunt, we were all good enough friends to be talking politics. Some of my urban classmates were confused by the fact that I am a hunter and an environmentalist both, and I felt like wailing, so vast seems the distance between us, and so short the time remaining in which to cross it.
One of Steve’s teaching tools—his one and only prop, actually—was a little replica of the black and orange clay pigeon we’d been shooting at all day. The replica was about the size of a fifty-cent piece, which is about what the real pigeon looks like, over the end of your barrel, forty yards out—and sometimes before a shot Steve would align his toy pigeon at the end of our barrel, to help us visualize how to make this shot. If it was a crossing-left shot, he would place the toy pigeon just to the left of the end of the barrel—reminding us visually, in that manner, to shoot at the head. It was a little like a crutch, priming us beforehand with so specific a search image; but man, did it work.
Most of the time.
Occasionally, each of us would fall into a slump, and when one or the other did, it was for the rest of us a feeling like watching someone step through thin ice and disappear, or slide down a steep slope toward some awful abyss. There was the urge to reach out a helping hand—to pull your companion back into the land of the dream zone, and good shooting, sure shooting—but there was nothing that could be done, it was all internal, and we could only watch the shooter try to punch his or her way out of that lit tle misery. It was horrible to watch—a previously smooth stroke, slow and confident, relapsing into a herky-jerky stabbing, complete sometimes with the wavering figure-eight at the end of the barrel—the barrel end drawing invisible ellipses around the bird, but not covering it—before and after each hit. After earlier achievements of grace, the reappearance of awkwardness embarrassed us, like the rudeness of some stranger. Who invited you, anyway?
What makes a good teacher, a great teacher? It was interesting to me, when one of my classmates hit a slump, to sit back and watch Steve watch the slumper. I don’t know how many rounds we’d fired by this time—surely it was in the high hundreds—and Steve no longer asked us for an analysis after each miss, but instead just watched us try to sort it out on our own, as we would have to do in the future.
Kathy hit no slump. Steve noticed it, and commented on it—the point at which she crossed over into Dreamland. All the times before, she’d been letting Steve eject her spent shells, and reload new ones. At some point, after perhaps a dozen pigeons dusted, she began ejecting her own shells with authority and confidence, and held out her hand, asking the Candy Man for more. If it had been a competition, she would be outshooting us all. But it wasn’t. It was just a process, a movement, a dreaminess and a steadiness. Sometimes to me it felt strangely as if the pigeons were swimming through the air, so slowly did they seem to be moving, and swinging the gun on them also felt like swimming—so easy. Kathy described it that way too; she said that for her, it seemed as if the pigeons were “floating.”
Steve just smiled. The pounding of our guns seemed to be lulling him, centering him.
When my own turn for a slump came, I fought it, of course. I tried to shoot my way out of it, but couldn’t, and then I tried to think my way out of it, which certainly didn’t work. In frustration, I asked Steve a bonehead question: Is there such thing as a “natural” shooter?
He simply laughed. He’d heard the question a million times. “For fifty thousand dollars,” he said, “you too can be a natural shooter.”
Finally, long after I’d given up—once I’d gotten to the point of not caring, and then some—I pulled back out of the slump. Steve let me shoot some more—enough to get my confidence back, and enough for my muscles to regain the memory of success—and then it was the next shooter’s turn, and it was as if the slump never happened: as if it were only one page in a long-ago chapter.
The big question, then: it was the third day, and we were shooting doubles. How would this translate to the field? Would it translate at all?
Steve smiled. “Man, birds are going to be so easy, after this. You’re not going to believe how easy they’ll seem compared to the clay pigeons.”
My heart leapt, dared to hope.
A storm swept across the mountains, rushing across the meadow toward us and bending the tall grasses like waves at sea.
Steve’s back was turned to the storm. We were all gathered under an awning that the lodge had constructed for us, so that we could keep on shooting; even in the rain—so rare, for this time of year.
The wind caught the awning; lifted it, and the poles and struts that framed it, toppling the whole works. I cried out a warning to Steve just as the poles broke loose, but there was no time; the whole works came over on top of us, and one of the crossbeams struck him in the head.
He ignored the damage, joked that it was a good thing it only hit him in the head—but for a second, as the tarp wrapped around us and the wind howled and the crossbars flew, I saw a look cross his face—a tenseness—that made me wonder if the storm, for at least a few seconds, and the surprise of it, might have brought back at least some tiny glimmer of the war a quarter of a century ago.
After it was all over, we shared a drink in front of the fireplace at the lodge. Steve asked me to keep in touch—to be sure and let him know how my hunting season fared. I was scheduled to head to Washington in three days for a hunt.
And here is how it went.
On the first two days, I shot as well as I ever have in my life. The California quail looked like little whirring buzz-bombs, their wings spinning but bodies filled seemingly with helium. I seemed able to see every feather as they flew. I could see their eyes. I shot out in front of them; some fell. The chukhars fell too, including a double, which made me feel like alerting the media. A Hun tumbled at long range.
The third day, I reverted to my old tricks. I missed a lot. I missed a lot of easy shots.
The fourth and last day, I shot worse than I have ever shot in my life—which, as I hope you’ll understand, covers quite a bit of territory.
And that is how the rest of the season went for me: erratic, but with some good days, whereas in the past, there had been none, as far as birds killed went.
Reviewing my season—my hits, my misses—Steve Schultz would say I need more practice, and more lessons, I suspect. And he would be right.
I told myself what I have been telling myself for years—what all men and women who miss have told themselves, in the thin consolation of an absence of birds: Well, anyway, my dog still loves me.