PART I. FIELD SHOOTING AND BASIC HUNTING

Chapter 1. Plinking With a Purpose

When Art Richardson dropped us at the starting point of our hunt near Myrtle Creek, Oregon, there were six miles of mountain, meadows, sage brush and forest between us and camp.

Art looked up across the mountains where a ravel of morning mist still toyed with a peak. "You know," he said, "before we hit camp we are going to get mountain goat shooting, some brush shooting like we have on deer each autumn, open mule deer shooting, and some long range elk shooting."

Sounded like a big order that early June morning, especially with big game season so far in the future, and no mountain goat shooting within hundreds of miles of our hunting territory. Our game this day was actually ground squirrel and jack rabbit. But the day's hunting delivered just such shooting, even though the early spring nip to the air still held the ground squirrel close to their burrows, except on the sunny south slopes where the first tender shoots of grass and elk clover pushed up through the lean shale hillsides.

Art Richardson is a gunsmith and an expert hunter. He makes beautiful myrtle-wood rifle stocks. He hunts deer and elk in season. During off-season periods he hunts jack rabbit and ground squirrel. In his personal huntings arms rack there are at least ten super dupers-.257 Roberts, .270 Winchester, .30/06-sleekly stocked with myrtle, beautifully scope sighted. This morning, however, he pulled a rifle from its scabbard for squirrel hunting which rocked me back on my heels, a .38/40 lever action Winchester.

I uncased a Mossberg .22 with a scope sight. In my hunting jacket, along with a sandwich and binoculars, there were two hundred rounds of ammunition for it. No ultra high velocity rifles here!

But wait a minute! Did you ever come to grips with the problem of trajectory and bullet drop? Try playing with one of those old black powder rifles, or a .22 rim-fire. They certainly bring the problem of long range hitting into focus as nothing else will.

Art had this in mind when he selected this beautiful old Winchester lever action for our first small game trip of the season, though I had expected him to show with a .25/20 or a .25/35 when he told me the evening before that he was taking a rifle with plenty of bullet drop. I know I had big game hunting in mind when I selected a Mossberg .22.

Sometime hunters are prone to forget the basic things of hunting. It is good to go afield occasionally with a rifle shooting a bullet with a rainbow curve, just to sharpen hunting and shooting wits against the day when one is abroad with some­thing more powerful, big game the quarry.

We eased along the logging road leading toward the divide, our hunting jackets zipped up against the early morning chill. Momentarily, as I looked up those long slopes and rock escarp­ments, I confess I thought longingly of my .222 Marlin which would reach out and nip a ground squirrel at two hundred yards, for these squirrel are a first cousin to woodchuck in habit, with the added virtue of seeming more canny and shy. They require a degree of stalking skill equal with that of still hunting deer on the autumn hardwood ridges.

My first opportunity for shooting came, not at a ground squirrel, however, but at an early morning jack rabbit sitting on a granite boulder a hundred fifty yards up-slope.

"Purely a mountain goat shot," said Art.

"Purely a fine chance for a miss with a .22," I said, somewhat dubious of the possibilities.

"Let's," as the politicians say, "take a look at the record." My .22 Mossberg rifle was sighted in for 75 yards. Bullet flight over 150 yards is as follows, using scope sights: 25 yards, about one-half inch above line of sights; 50 yards, one inch above; 75 yards, on point of aim; 100 yards, about three inches below point of aim; 125 yards, eight inches below point of aim, and 150 yards, fifteen inches below.

A jack sitting upright, as this one was, is at least sixteen inches tall. I looked him over in the scope, eased my aim up about a half rabbit length above him, and touched off the shot. My position was a sitting one, with my forearm resting over a broken piece of granite—rock steady for the shot. Not a breath of air stirred, save the usual thermal drift downslope which occurs at this time.

My .22 snicked spitefully, touching off the echoes among the mist shrouded peaks. The jack gave a limber legged jump and went end over end into a bitterbrush.

Mountain goat shot?

What ranges would duplicate the bullet drop of my .22 rimfire, assuming you were big game hunting in open territory? Art has a model 70 .270 Winchester which he uses on elk quite often when the ranges are apt to be long, across the wide can­yons of those Pacific Coast logging burns. Using a 150 grain bullet, the path of this lethal slug above and below point of aim is as follows, to duplicate that .22 high speed long rifle, give or take a few inches. The .270 sighted in to hit point of aim at 200 yards, the bullet would be: at 50 yards, 0.7 inches above point of aim; 100 yards, 3.0 inches above; 200 yards, on point of aim; 300 yards, 10.5 inches below, and 325 yards, 15 inches below point of aim.

Let's see how that shot would stack up against the open western shooting sometimes obtained with a .30/06, using 150 grain loading. Sighted to hit point of aim at 200 yards, the path of the bullet is as follows: 50 yards, 0.6 inches above point of aim; 100 yards, 2.5 inches above; 200 yards, on point of aim; 300 yards, 9.1 inches below, and 335, 15 inches below point of aim. Mule deer, elk, mountain goat—the spiteful crack of my .22 rimfire did have many of the elements of long range game shooting, elements which are best ironed out before the opening of the autumn big game season when one is called upon to make a careful precision shot across a sage brush canyon, or, when the game is elk, across those long alpine meadows which those huge deer love.

Of course, in big game shooting there are other factors be­side long range precision shooting. While my shot had all the elements of long range big game shooting, it only represented a very small percentage of actual field shots autumn cover presents to a hunter. For that matter, it only represents a small per cent of off-season pest shooting. There are other shots equally important, and requiring just as high a degree of shoot­ing skill.

We eased around the bare face of a granite escarpment, then down through a draw where the foxtail grass was a green tracery against the scattering of bronze shale and rock.

Two jack rabbits flushed from a clump of sweetbriar, taking off with those long easy, loping strides which cover ground so fast, but which seem so slow and awkward. Art snapped his old .38/40 lever action to his shoulder, and as the butt touched, the satisfying roar of his old obsolete coal burner set the echoes to bouncing back and forth among the buttes.

Those jacks were running along a game trail through the bitterbrush, angling sharply away from us when Art fired. The rear one went end over end as the other disappeared in the small growing stuff without affording either of us another shot. Examination showed that Art's bullet had taken his jack well back toward the flank, emerging through the chest area, a very deadly shot, and properly placed to have made a kill on a deer quartering away from a hunter.

Two shots: one of a type used when big game hunters reach way out there to make a kill, the other very typical of about ninety-five per cent of all deer and elk shooting. Of the two, Art's snapshot at the running jack rabbit was the more difficult, and required much more field shooting skill than my shot taken from a sitting position at a hundred fifty yards.

If small game hunting, aside from being a wonderful sport in itself, is to pay off later in big game hunting, there must be a shaping up the shooting to that end. That is the primary con­sideration. A secondary consideration is the shaping up of equipment to conform to big woods standards when you take to the autumn deer trails.

With the first soft warmth of the early June morning sun, ground squirrels begin a cautious emergence from their burrows.

Here we found a caution comparable to that of a wise old whitetail buck snoozing away an autumn hunting season in the laurel thickets. Here is a canniness associated with a big bull elk hazing his harem down from the summer ranges when the first snows of the winter are falling, and storm winds are growling across the mountains. These ground squirrels operate on the theory that out of sight is out of mind. The least movement will pop them into their holes with warning cries which will touch off the alarm system of an entire colony scattered over twenty acres of hillside.

They have a characteristic, however, which gives a rifleman beautiful off-hand practice for big game shooting. Foraging well away from their burrows early in the morning, they stand up on their hind legs occasionally and take a long careful look. When alarmed they take off like a streak for the security of their burrows. But before diving below they pause, sit upright to scan their backtrail. If you are to get a shot while they hold this pose, there must be a precise mounting of your rifle, a quick centering of the crosshairs, and the shot squeezed off at once. From start to finish, there is every element of a big game shot, with the target poised for instant flight, and a premium placed on a quick accurate let-off.

Want to iron out your running shooting on deer? Take those ground squirrel between pauses as they scurry for the security of their burrows. Have something in mind about a better synchronization of sighting and trigger squeeze? Want to take the time lag out of your big game snapshooting? Concentrate on that pause when they stand up to look over their back-trail with that "What in heck scared me?" expression on their faces. If it is long range mountain shooting you have in mind, there are always sections where you can get that type shooting by catching them sunning on rock outcroppings, and piles of dirt in front of their dens, nice two and three hundred yard targets for a .220 Swift model 70 Winchester, .222 Remington, Marlin, or some of the wildcat calibers, such as the .22 Varminter, the .228 Ackley Magnum. Best though, is taking them field run, with modified deer equipment from sights to rifle action.

Riflemen are prone to departmentalize their sport. They separate their stalking ability from their shooting, when actually their shot is on the make from the time they start to hunt until the quarry is sighted. They separate their small game rifle from large, and their sighting equipment, when in reality there should be a striving for a closer relationship.

We eased over a slight rise where a clump of scrub oak and bitterbrush gave us a screening from which to conn a small basin below. At first glance it appeared barren of squirrel. Nothing moved in the grass. We waited, our broadfield Bushnell binoculars, with their extreme wide fields of view, giving us a clear field of the greening flat. Suddenly a brownish head popped up. Then another and another, until I counted an even dozen. The closest was about seventy-five yards, the longest range about a hundred twenty-five. I took an off-hand shot from the sheltering thicket at this one, holding the crosshairs level with the top of his head. At the viscous snap of my highspeed hollow point bullet, there was a terrific thrashing around, and a fluffy gray tail waved above the grass momentarily as I got a clean kill.

At the sound of the shot the place literally erupted ground squirrel. I snapped a shot at a running target at about ninety yards, kicking dust up directly behind a squirrel of aldermanic proportions, then corrected my lead. Next shot turned him around, and a third rolled him for keeps.

Art's .38/40 roared, and I saw a ground squirrel at least a foot off the ground. Then he started working on one trying for a cairn of granite boulders a hundred yards from our hide­out. Third shot he neatly beheaded his target at about seventy-five yards range. Then he got another which had paused at one hundred yards to see what all the shooting was about.

Stack those shot up against the average big game shooting and you find little difference, though the targets are a trifle smaller then the vital area on deer or elk. A ground squirrel is some ten or twelve inches long, rather heftily built, affording a target about four by ten inches when he sits up to take observa­tions—less when he is on the move.

I was beginning to see the point of Art bringing his old black powder, .38/40 Winchester. It had a trajectory curve over a hundred twenty-five yards which very closely duplicated his .270 at the longer mule deer range. His .38/40 was sighted in for one hundred yards. This placed his 180 grain bullet 3.2 inches above line of sights at 50 yards, on at 100 yards, and at least 13 inches low at 150 yards. No room for sloppy yardage estimating here—not if you wanted to connect much beyond fifty yards.

We moved along the edge of the hill, nipping around by easy stages, picking up two or three short range shots. Then we came to a draw cutting into the bare granite ribs of a higher ridge. Here I got two close misses on running squirrels flushed from a clump of scrub oak. Then on a third try at fifty yards I made a clean kill on one going directly away from me.

We could hear the characteristic warning call of ground squirrel all along the broken granite ridge, a call which is very distinct but hard to reduce to paper—"Ech—hit! Ech—Hit!'* usually repeated two or three times. It very handily pin-points the game, and also serves the useful purpose of warning us to take it easy because the entire colony was alerted.

A squirrel stood as stiffly erect as a Coldstream Guard, about forty yards away. I snapped a shot at him, knowing I had only a split second in which to get it off before he dived for the security of his burrow. Art blasted one off a rock ledge at about the same range an instant later.

We crossed through a dense fir woods without seeing any game save two or three fawns which flushed on the sunny south slope of a heavily brushed hill. These deer went trotting around a hillside for about seventy yards, then paused to look back at us before disappearing in the scrub oak—a beautiful sight, and one reminding us of the purpose behind our small game shoot­ing during the closed big game season.

By the time we arrived across the mountains at our pickup point, we had a sample of every type of big game shooting which might be encountered on the North American continent. We had used the sitting position time after time. We had plenty of snapshooting, off-hand tries. Several times we had an opportunity to rest a forearm against a steadying oak to make a careful shot when nothing more than one eye and a part of a squirrel's head was visable on a rock ledge.

Small game and pest shooting is an end within itself. But it always takes an added rifleman's virtues when it is shaped toward big game hunting. Main thing is not to over-specialize. Sometimes it is good practice to go afield with very basic rifle equipment in order to emphasize the problems of big game shooting. Then, when autumn rolls around, and you are prowl­ing the hardwood ridges with deer on your mind, those off­season shooting forays will pay off with enviable regularity.

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