The basic operation of firearms hasn’t changed in the eight hundred years or so we’ve had them, and the principle is beautifully simple. The pressure created by burning propellant pushes a projectile through a tube. That’s it.

Image borrowed from howstuffworks.com

Over those eight hundred years, the propellant has changed (although the black powder of the old days isn’t so far removed from the smokeless powder we use now), the loading method has changed (we generally don’t load from the muzzle), and the way the powder is ignited has changed (flint-on-steel has been replaced by primer made of pressure-sensitive explosive and triggered by a firing pin). The basic idea, though, is the same.

This is why guns that had a career robbing stagecoaches are still in circulation and also why Kevin and I, last week, ended up buying a gun older than we are.

We had three guns already – all shotguns. Kevin owned a .410 Remington and a 12-gauge Browning Citori when I met him, and he bought me a Remington 870 20-gauge for my birthday two years ago. Unfortunately, none of those guns was able to get us a deer last season.

Deer hunting on Cape Cod is difficult, partly because there are many hunters and not many deer, and partly because we’re prohibited from using rifles. Instead, we load shotguns with slugs (preferably using a rifled barrel, which my 20-gauge has), and wait for a close-range opportunity.

This year, we’re going to try our luck in Vermont, in the woods behind our friend Dave’s house. Unlike Massachusetts, Vermont allows rifles, but that’s helpful only if you have one.

Last week found us meandering through the backroads of North Carolina, on our way home from the wedding of our good friend Allison Fishman and our new friend Aaron Task, and we kept seeing billboards for the world’s largest gun store. Mackey’s, it was called. We’d been considering buying a rifle, and we talked about maybe going to find the store. But we had a long drive ahead of us, and neither of us made a move for the GPS.

We continued the meander.

And then we saw a sign we did stop for. “Boiled Peanuts.”

I’d never had a boiled peanut, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. We pulled in and got ourselves a pint.

Now, having tasted them, I have a theory. Boiled peanuts are yet another manifestation of the inferiority complex that the South has had ever since it lost the Civil War. By insisting that a product that is clearly inferior to its roasted Northern counterpart, and arguably inedible, is actually a regional delicacy, the appreciation of which separates the men (that would be them) from the boys (obviously us), they are holding on to their sense of separateness in the feeble hope that, some day, they will rise again.

I’m thinking boiled peanuts should go the way of slavery, although I stop short of supporting a Constitutional amendment.

As we stood in the parking lot, marveling at the watery taste and cardboard texture of this Southern taste treat, we took a moment to look around. Right there, across the street, was the world’s largest gun shop.

I have no idea whether it really is the world’s largest gun shop, not having been in all the others. I can say, though, that it’s definitely a really big gun shop.

When you walk in, the first thing that hits you is the smell of cigarette smoke, which transports you back to about 1978, which was the last time you were in a store where someone was smoking. A very nice woman looked up from her paperwork. “Shotguns to the left,” she said, gesturing to a cavernous room filled with racks, “Rifles to the right.”

The rifle room was as big as the shotgun room, and there were hundreds of guns, new and used. I know next to nothing about rifles and browsed aimlessly, but Kevin looked with a purpose.

He found a gun he liked, and he called me over to show me.

“It’s a Marlin .30-30,” he said. “An old one, but it’s in great condition.”

“How old?” I asked.

“Probably from the sixties.”

He asked to see it, and they unlocked it. He worked the action and mounted it to see how it felt. It felt good, and he decided to buy it. After ascertaining that he wasn’t a felon or a fugitive from justice, they sold it to him.

When we got home, we checked the serial number and found out it was made in 1950. I couldn’t help but be a little leery of a sixty-year-old gun, but Kevin assured me that guns like that get passed down through generations, and that the new ones are almost identical to the one we’d just bought.

Still, when we brought it to the range, I was a little apprehensive. I asked him to shoot it first. Nice, eh?

We put targets at fifty yards, and he shot it. A little low, a little left, but only a couple inches from the bulls-eye. After a couple more shots, he handed it to me.

I was still apprehensive. My experience shooting a slug through my 20-gauge had me braced for a big bang and a strong kick. But this gun was entirely different. It wasn’t nearly as loud or as boisterous, and the sights were such that I felt I could aim it with confidence. At fifty yards, all my shots were in a one-foot circle, which isn’t great but is probably acceptable. At a hundred yards, I had more trouble, but I’ll go back and practice.

Beyond how it feels to hold and to shoot, it’s the action I like. It’s got a lever that ejects the spent cartridge as you pull it out, and loads the new cartridge when you push it back. It has a smooth, solid, mechanical feel, like all the parts mesh together exactly the way they’re supposed to. It feels like a well-made tool.

Before we took the rifle to the range, I was having some trouble mustering enthusiasm for deer-hunting. (I wasn’t the only one – NorCal Cazadora wrote about the self-same problem.) But the rifle makes a difference, and it’s hard to explain why. I’ve practiced with my 20-gauge, and I’m reasonably accurate at fifty yards, the longest shot I’d take. But it feels like the wrong tool for the job. It’s a shotgun that’s been jury-rigged to imitate a rifle. I feel better being in the woods with a firearm that’s designed to do the job at hand, particularly if feels right in my hands and against my shoulder.

Which is a problem, given that the Marlin is Kevin’s gun, and he likes it as much as I do.

Luckily, our friend Tim offered to lend us his Winchester .30-06 (a somewhat more powerful rifle of the same caliber). Maybe we’ll trade off.

I’ve known, in other parts of life, what it feels like to use a tool that suits you. I have a Cleveland five-wood that must have been made for me. My chef’s knife fits in my hand and rocks on the cutting board just the way I want it to. While I’m perfectly capable of using other clubs, and other knives, those are the ones I’m happiest with.

So why do I feel like the Marlin .30-30 is poised atop the slippery slope that has “gun nut” at the bottom?

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I blame Tovar. He started it, in a post at A Mindful Carnivore about wounding animals.

In search of pheasant

Every hunter I know believes it is a hunter’s responsibility to kill an animal cleanly. Ideally, you drop it with one shot. If you hit an animal but don’t kill it, it’s your job to track it and finish the job.

Although even the most conscientious hunter will sometimes lose a wounded animal, I think it’s fair to say that making that happen as infrequently as possible is the single most important guiding principle of hunting. (Okay, there’s don’t shoot people, but that’s a little different.)

Yet deeply ingrained in the loose collection of principles that is hunting ethics we have the concept of “fair chase.”

Different people have different definitions, but it boils down to giving an animal a sporting chance. Many hunters frown on shooting a duck in the water, taking a turkey off a roost, or luring a deer in with bait. What it boils down to is that those strategies most likely to yield a clean kill are considered off limits to the “ethical” hunter.

I have no objection to going into the thickest part of the woods and pitting your wits against a deer by trying to get it to come into range. Making hunting difficult is not incompatible with a commitment to a clean kill. But what, exactly, is the objection to making hunting easier?

It’s not sporting, it’s not fair, it somehow violates a fundamental sense of justice to take an animal that’s sleeping, stunned by sudden light, or baited.

As Holly at NorCal Cazadora has pointed out, if you’re concerned about having an unfair advantage over an animal, what’s with the gun? Seems to me that firearms irrevocably tipped the scales in favor of humans as predators. If you really want to give your deer a sporting chance, go into the woods unarmed and see how well you do with a pointy stick.

The problem with “fair chase” is that the more you level the playing field, the more likely you are to wound an animal. There’s evidence that the deer wounding rate for archery is higher than that for firearms, yet I have heard bowhunters talk about the authenticity of the experience and the satisfaction of taking a deer without a firearm.

And I understand that. To be perfectly clear, I do not oppose bowhunting, or any strategy that makes hunting more difficult. I just think that, the more likely your hunting method is to wound, the more committed you have to be to developing your skills and the more careful you have to be about deciding which shots to take. Responsible bowhunters are very skilled and very careful, and their feeling of accomplishment when they take an animal successfully must be commensurate.

I respect skill. I know some very experienced, responsible, successful hunters, hunters who wouldn’t dream of baiting a deer, and my hat is off to them for having gotten good at something difficult. I hope to learn from them and become more skillful myself.

My point here (and I do have one) is that what’s “sporting” is arbitrary. And I think a commitment to a clean kill trumps any consideration of fair chase. While I appreciate the challenge of hunting, the need to understand an animal in order to get close enough to it to kill it, and the connection to wildlife that many hunters feel, the primary reason I hunt is for food. If I can take an animal easily, I will.

The deer doesn’t care whether you shoot it over a feeder or you take it in the wild. The deer does care that you kill it in such a way as to minimize its suffering. Anything that makes that more likely is okay in my book.

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I know there are ducks in Barnstable Harbor. I see them every time I go out to work the oysters, or to fish. I have a gun, I have my shiny new 2011 hunting license, I have all my waterfowl stamps. Nothing was preventing me from going out and trying to shoot a duck.

Kevin, while not keen on duck hunting, was willing to aid and abet. He called our friend Tim, also a novice duck hunter, and recruited him to join us. Then he called Les, whose boat is still in the water, and asked to borrow it. And yesterday afternoon, on the tail of the ebb tide, the three of us headed out for my very first duck hunt.

The plan was to take the boat out into the middle of harbor, and then drift (you’re not allowed to shoot a duck from a boat under power). Kevin, who wasn’t going to hunt, took the helm, and Tim and I settled into the bow, on the lookout for ducks.

We didn’t have to look far. It was duck central out there. Tim peered through his binoculars and spotted eiders, black ducks, pintails, and buffleheads. All we had to do was to get them in close enough.

I’d seen hunters out in the harbor before. Standard operating procedure seems to be to get a greenish boat, dress in camouflage, and set a string of decoys out behind you. We had neither the right color boat nor the decoys, so we motored out to where the ducks seemed to be, cut the motor, and hoped for the best.

Within the first five minutes, a bufflehead flew about thirty yards in front of us. Tim took aim and fired. He was a little behind – buffleheads are fast – and he tried again. It was the third shot that brought down the bird. We motored over and Tim reached over to retrieve it.

Tim and his bufflehead

This was Tim’s first duck ever, and although he joked about its rather diminutive size, he was obviously excited. I was excited for him. I’ve been out in the field with a gun enough to understand the satisfaction of success.

Tim stowed his bird, and we went a little farther east in the harbor. The wind was out of the west, and we were drifting east at a pretty good clip when a male eider crossed the bow, heading south, about twenty yards out.

An eider is bigger and slower than a bufflehead, and is reputed to be one of the worst-tasting ducks on the planet. But I wasn’t thinking about how I’d cook it as I mounted my gun and followed the duck’s flight.

It was close in, and flying across the wind, so I stayed only a little bit ahead of it. When the distance between the duck and the muzzle seemed right, and the gun felt solid on my shoulder, I took my first ever shot at a living creature.

Eider down!

I was astonished. My first shot, my first duck. Beneath the adrenaline and surprise, I felt so big and bad.

Until I noticed that the duck wasn’t dead. He didn’t even look hurt, just startled and irritated. And then he dove.

We drove over and, as we waited for him to resurface, my big badness turned to dismay. I was doing the single worst thing you can do in hunting – wound an animal and then not be able to track it and take it.

And then he popped up, twenty yards out. I took aim, but I’m unaccustomed to shooting a stationary object – a sitting duck – with the regular shotgun barrel. The deer barrel is made for that, and has a notched sight to line up, but the bird barrel only has a bead on the end. I did my best, but I missed him low. He dove again. Damn!

We waited, and waited some more. He came up again, this time just feet off the bow. But I wasn’t expecting him to be in so close, and I wasn’t ready. I didn’t even get a shot off before he dove again.

And then he simply vanished. We waited, all three of us scanning the water, for longer than any duck should be able to dive. No eider.

On the plus side, that may have meant that he wasn’t seriously hurt – or even hurt at all – and he’d live to outwit another hunter. On the minus side, that was my duck. My very first duck! And it just bloody swam away!

It wasn’t long, though, before I had another chance. Tim, secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t going home empty-handed, generously gave me the shot at the next duck to come in range, another eider. This time, a female.

My first shot missed, but the second, as the duck was flying away from us, didn’t. She dropped right out of the sky.

Redemption, I thought.

We drove over to collect my duck.

No duck. No trace of duck. No feathers, no nothing. She simply disappeared.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Barnstable Harbor is the Bermuda Triangle of ducks. You shoot them, and Neptune calls them home rather than letting you have them. Even eiders, which are reputed to taste like low tide.

I had one more shot before sunset closed in, but it was on the outside of my range and I flat-out missed. We went in, I congratulated Tim on his trophy bufflehead, and we went home, duckless.

It was only when I got home that I realized my mistake. It’s such an embarrassing mistake that I’m reluctant to tell you about it, but I suppose it’s just possible that someone, somewhere, might be prevented from making the same mistake if I go public.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m accustomed to making mistakes, and my various blunders have, at various times, resulted in deerlessness, clamlessness, beetlessness, and root beerlessness. Lessness seems to be a way of life around here.

But this. This was class-A stupid.

It stemmed from My Consult with Andre.

Our friend Andre is pushing eighty, and has a lifetime of hunting experience. When I decided I wanted to go out and try for a duck, I stopped by his house with a dozen eggs in the hopes that he’d give me some good advice. Which he did.

One of the things we talked about was shot size. What should I use, I asked. “Five,” he said, and then ticked off on his fingers, “Or four, three, two, one, or BB. Use what you have.”

And here’s where I went wrong. I assumed that, since a BB gun was a little baby air gun, that BBs were the smallest shot. Therefore, number five had to be the biggest of the sizes Andre ticked off. When I checked our armory, I found that the size I had was seven. Well, that would be just fine, I figured. Large shot might be appropriate for someone whose shotgun skills aren’t all they could be.

Those of you who hunt are undoubtedly now shaking your heads in dismay and disbelief because you know perfectly well that any bonehead with Google and an IQ over room temperature can look up shot size and find out that larger numbers correspond to smaller shot.

There is an upside here. Those two ducks I shot are almost assuredly flying, swimming, and quacking in perfect health. It’s unlikely that number seven shot, at twenty or thirty yards, can even penetrate an eider’s underlayer of down, let alone do serious damage. The only injury was to my big, bad hunter ego.

I have twelve duck-hunting days left to see if I can repair the damage.

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Man the hunter

Deer hunting season has been over for three hours now, and we have to chalk this year up to experience. No deer, but something of an education.

We learned about how, where, and when to look for deer, and what we should smell like while we’re doing it. We learned about deer blinds and tree stands, driving and stalking, guns and ammunition. I learned that waving your hunter-orange hat is the universal sign for “Don’t shoot me.”

I also learned that I’m not cut out for long stints in the woods, standing still and doing nothing.

There’s a lot of that in deer hunting. Hours and hours of it, sometimes. You stand (or sit), keeping noise and movement to a minimum, trying to act like a tree, listening for a sign of deer. Most hunters I know, while they acknowledge the hardship of it, find good in it as well.

I’ve cited Tovar Cerulli, who blogs at A Mindful Carnivore, before. This is what he has to say about being in the woods at dawn, waiting for deer:

I can’t recall ever taking so much pleasure in simply sitting, eyes closed. My mind went still, letting go of its churning thoughts about the next chapter I would be drafting for my book, or about the research I’m doing in grad school, interviewing hunters who came to the pursuit as adults. I was hardly even thinking about deer.

And he’s not alone. There seems to be an almost universal sense among people who frequent the woods – hunters, campers, hikers – that peace, or freedom, or meaning, is to be found there.

A couple of posts ago, when I griped about spending so many deerless hours in the trees, astute commenter Brooke posted a Wendell Berry poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” by way of encouragement:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

And I want to be encouraged but, if there’s a gene for finding peace and freedom in the great outdoors, I was born without it. Maybe it’s linked to the gene for musical ability, or negotiation skills. While I think the woods can be very nice, especially when the sun is out and the weather is warm, having to be silent and still in them is, to me, nothing but a chore.

I envy what Wendell Berry and his fellow agrarian contemplatives find in the woods, and although I don’t share their sensibility, I enjoy reading some of them. E.B. White, when he left New York City for a farm in Maine just before the advent of World War II, wrote a number of wonderful essays anthologized in One Man’s Meat. Berry himself writes engagingly about agriculture, although I part company with him on some environmental issues. Walden, for the record, I loathe.

My problem, I think, is that I am soulless. I don’t look for meaning because I don’t believe life has any beyond that with which we endow it with our words and deeds. I think the plants and animals in the woods are interesting, but I don’t find majesty or mystery. My strategy for controlling anxiety is distraction, not contemplation, and sitting quietly with nothing to do doesn’t clear my head. How can your head be clear when the bathtub needs scrubbing? Are the property taxes due? What on earth am I going to make for dinner? Is that a deer tick?

So, in the many hours I spent in the woods over the course of the last two weeks, there was no peace. There was no tranquility. And there sure as hell was no ten-point buck.

But there was a doe. A real, live doe.

I heard her as I stood, still, next to a tree about twenty yards down from a ridge. She came from my right, behind me, and as soon as I heard the leaves rustle I knew it was a deer. A deer doesn’t sound like a squirrel, or a hunter, or the wind. The noise was a set of sharp, quick hoofsteps in the dry leaves. Clip … clip … clip clip.

The sound got closer and I slowly turned around. There she was, maybe thirty yards away, crossing my field of view across the ridge. She was easily in range, but there were two problems. First, I was facing down the slope, and to turn around and get a shot without spooking her would have been difficult. Second, she was right on the ridge line, which meant I couldn’t see what was on the other side of her. One of the cardinal rules of gun safety is to know what’s beyond your target.

She went by behind me and headed down the slope and into the woods to my left. I had a shot. For someone of my minimal skill, it was a long shot, probably fifty yards. It was through trees and brambles, but I had a shot.

I pointed my gun. I saw her head and chest, looking very small above my gun sight. But it took me just a moment too long to line up the notch on the sight with the bead on the muzzle. It wasn’t quite right, and I didn’t have confidence in the shot.

I didn’t take it. She went on her way, out of range.

In eight days of hunting, that’s the only deer I saw. Kevin saw none, although he heard at least two. I am haunted by the sight of her, and how a more experienced hunter would have handled the situation differently and undoubtedly gotten a shot. But I am constrained by the idea that I am out in the woods, with a deadly weapon, inexperienced and unsupervised. While I’d very much like to bring home a deer, my first priority is handling a gun safely and responsibly.

That deer, though, will be what gets me out to brave the cold and the tedium, the ticks and the greenbriar, next year at this time. There will never be tranquility, but there will, some day, be venison.

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I didn’t see a deer, I didn’t hear a deer, I didn’t even step in deer shit. It was a relentlessly deerless day.

Basically, we made a mistake. Like real estate, the first three rules of deer hunting are location, location, location. If you are where the deer aren’t, you’re doomed to failure. You don’t even get a chance to make those other mistakes, like smelling human or wearing blue. Or just plain missing.

No deer. No deer at all.

Our chosen location – and I can’t believe I’m actually balking at telling you where it is even though there are no deer there – was the Old Jail Lane conservation area, a 180-acre parcel that I heard from reputable sources does have deer. Several weeks back, Kevin and I cased the joint, hoping to find a spot to put the VarmintCam to scout for deer.

We walked the trails, looking for signs of deer. I’d read up, and I knew to look for deer droppings, spots on trees where bucks rub their antlers, bedding areas, and places in the terrain that deer were likely to funnel through.

Once you’re in the woods, though, it all just looks like woods. I’m sure the deer droppings were there, and I know the rubbed tree trunks were because our friend Les pointed them out to me after the fact, but I couldn’t spot them the first time around. As for deer beds and deer funnels, I wouldn’t know them if they had road signs.

If you can’t track deer, the next best thing is to track deer hunters. OK, I missed the tree rubbings, but even I found the pile of Bud Light cans under the tree stand.

That last bit is an exaggeration. Most hunters I know are safety- and wilderness-minded, and they don’t drink and shoot or leave cans in their hunting grounds. But it’s true that the best clue we got as to the deer’s whereabouts came from evidence of hunters, rather than of deer.

We found a spot with a decrepit tree stand that obviously hadn’t been used in a long time. This, of course, raises the question of why it was abandoned. The most obvious answer? No deer. But there was something about the look of the place that made us think a deer would enjoy it, so we set up the VarmintCam and left it for a few days.

During those few days, we bought a deer blind. It’s a pop-up tent big enough for two, in woodland camo, with openings through which you look for and shoot at your deer.

Maybe it’s because my only exposure to camouflage as a child was in the cartoons, but I can’t help thinking there’s something inherently funny about it. Unless it’s wartime, and your camo is deadly serious, it’s hard to glue leaves to your hat and make like a shrubbery without seeing the humor.

Our deer blind has little nylon leaves on the edges to help it blend in, and a black interior that’s supposed to help contain our scent. Despite the fact that our VarmintCam revealed no deer activity whatsoever, the day before the season started, we set the blind up on our chosen site.  (Below is a video of that event, but you have to turn your computer sideways to watch it.)

This morning, before sunrise, we hiked out to it and set up shop. The weather was cold – about 25 degrees – but clear and still. We settled in and waited for 6:16, a half-hour before sunrise, when the first shot could be fired.

6:16 came and went. As did sunrise. As did an hour after sunrise. All we saw was the occasional hunter, who would spot our blind and wave his orange hat – Kevin tells me that’s the international sign for “Don’t shoot me.”

Can you see it?

The two rules of deer blinds are no talking and no moving. Ideally, there is also no farting, but that can’t always be avoided. As time went on, and we didn’t talk (much) or move (much), we became increasingly aware that it is all but impossible to keep your extremities warm while sitting still in sub-freezing temperatures.

I’d known to dress warmly, and I had more layers than a henhouse, but after two hours or so, I’d lost feeling in my fingers and toes. Another half-hour of deerlessness, and Kevin suggested we take a walk around. Not that we hoped to actually find a deer; we just needed some time out of blind.

We took a little hike, half-heartedly scoped out some other potential sites, and returned to our blind for one last chance. By 10:00 we were done.

My fellow writer and hunter Tovar Cerulli, of A Mindful Carnivore, posted about deer hunting just a few days ago. In the piece, he touted the virtues of a Zen attitude. (One of his commenters, Joshua of EnviroEthics, called his hunting Zen “the deer of no deer.”) Don’t try too hard, Tovar says. Commune with nature, he says. His aim, on opening day of his deer season, was to “just sit” and “just listen.” He wasn’t going to care about getting a deer.

Naturally, he wrote the post after he got his deer in the first hour of the first day of the season.

I don’t have Tovar’s mental discipline, and I’m afraid that there were only two thoughts that went through my mind on this, my first day of deer hunting: “I really want a deer,” and “Don’t shoot Kevin.”

I expect the same thoughts will be going through my mind tomorrow, my second day of deer hunting. We’re abandoning our deer blind and going with Plan B. Stay tuned.

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Unfortunately, I don’t even feel close to going out with a shotgun.

My shotgun is a 20 gauge Remington 870 with two interchangeable barrels. One is for hunting birds with shot. The other for hunting larger, four-footed animals with slugs.

When I first hear that you could go hunting with slugs, I wondered how that worked. I know you can go hunting with dogs, and they flush the birds for you. You can go hunting with falcons, which will actually go kill your prey and bring it back to you. But slugs?

The projectile in a Remington AccuTip Sabot Slug (image borrowed from remington.com)

No, not those kinds of slugs. The kind of slugs that are like bullets, only housed in a shell that fits it to a shotgun rather than a rifle.

It was only about fifteen minutes ago that I learned the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, so let me show off my shiny new knowledge by explaining it to you. The inside of the barrel of a shotgun is smooth, and the ordinary projectile is a pack of little lead or steel balls (shot) that disperse as they leave the muzzle of the gun.

The inside of the barrel of a rifle is, predictably, rifled. That is, it has grooves that run in a spiral down its length. They give spin to the projectile, which is a bullet, and the spin imparts both speed and accuracy.

For reasons that have more to do with gun laws than ballistic science, a shotgun with a rifled barrel is still a shotgun. The walls of the barrel are thinner than that of a rifle, and the slugs that come out of it don’t have the long-distance range that rifle bullets have. They are, however, accurate at distances somewhat north of 100 yards – in the right hands.

Mine, I found out last week, are not the right hands.

For the first time, I put the rifled barrel on the gun and went to the range. We’d bought sabot slugs, which are designed for use in rifled barrels (the sabot is the plastic case around the slug, that engages the rifling and keeps the slug in the middle of the barrel), and are very expensive. On sale for half price, a box of five was ten bucks. By contrast, a box of 25 shotgun shells can be as little as six dollars.

At the range, we put targets on the board that’s fifty yards from the shooting bench. I loaded one slug and took aim. I carefully lined up the front and rear sights, and tried to stay as still as possible. I squeezed the trigger, willing the slug to hit the target.

When the gun discharged, I was stunned. The noise was so loud, and the recoil so strong, that I felt as though I’d been physically assaulted. I was expecting the standard-issue bang I was used to from shooting shot shells. But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t anything close to the same.

Kevin thought I was hurt. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Our gun range, with guns

He had to ask twice before I told him I was fine, just really, really surprised. So surprised that I violated the first rule of gun safety. I pointed the muzzle in an unsafe direction. In this case, at the guy sitting a few feet away, aiming his 22. My gun wasn’t loaded, but that’s not the point.

It took me a couple minutes to recover. The shot had set adrenaline flowing, and I needed to wait for it to dissipate before I tried again.

The good news was, I hit the target. By which I mean the piece of paper that had the target printed on it. I was a good six inches away from the center, where I’d been aiming. Six inches off at fifty yards isn’t good.

All my shots but one hit the target, but none was as close to the center as I’d like. We tried to get back to the range to practice earlier this week, but it was closed for police training. So I’ll be headed out at the crack of dawn, first day of deer season, with very little confidence in my shotgun skills.

What that means is, I’ll take only a wide-open shot, at very close range. It’s highly unlikely that such a thing will present itself but, if it does, Kevin, who is a very good shot, will be there to back me up. We have no qualms about having a second hunter bring down a deer that the first hunter has wounded.

Given that our hunting camera (also known as the VarmintCam, now employed in the pursuit for which it was intended) has turned up not the faintest trace of a deer at our chosen site, the odds that I’ll have an opportunity to take a shot on the first morning are slim. And I’ll have a chance to get to the range again before we go out again.

But that’s not the only reason I approach deer season with trepidation. The bottom line is that, despite having taken many hours of gun safety instruction, shot trap and skeet, practiced at the range, and gone pheasant hunting, guns still scare the bejeezus out of me.

Does that ever go away?

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The physical exertion part, we choose to see as a positive; we’re counting on our lifestyle to help keep us stay fit as time and gravity do their worst. It’s the learning part that’s killing me.

Back in New York, I was making a concerted effort to learn French. I took a class, I listened to audio instruction, I slogged through books. But my forty-something-year-old brain balked at the very idea that it should be introduced to a new language, and the words just wouldn’t stick. I’d find myself hunting through memory for a French word, only to have the German word, or even the Hebrew word, assert itself. My German was never great, and my Hebrew was laughable, but I acquired them both back in the days of my robust youth, when you’re supposed to learn languages.

Me, trying to get the mount right

It’s also when you’re supposed to learn gun skills.

This past March, for my 47th birthday, Kevin gave me my first gun, a Remington 870 20-gauge shotgun. We shot trap and skeet a couple of times at Bass River Rod & Gun, but then the guns got put away for most of the summer, when we were occupied with other things.

Now, though, with hunting season around the corner, I’ve got to get serious.

I need to be a better shot, but that’s not the most important gun skill. Every hunter has to learn, first and foremost, to handle a gun safely.

The hunter education class I took last winter emphasized one thing over and over: always point the muzzle in a safe direction. It’s obvious and straightforward, but it’s surprisingly easy to forget when you have a gun in your hands. You start thinking about something else, like whose turn it is at trap or how many shells you have left in the bag, and you find yourself turning around and pointing the gun straight in front of you.

Handling a gun in such a way that the muzzle is always pointed safely is something you have to learn to do automatically, without thinking about it. It’s a physical skill you have to internalize and, like other physical skills, it’s best to learn it when you’re young.

We went to the shotgun range yesterday with our friend Andre, who volunteered his clay target thrower. Andre’s somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty years old, but unless you’re pretty tough he could take you. He does everything we do, with energy to spare. He hunts and fishes and shellfishes. He takes care of his seven-acre property, including garden and sheep. He’s active in the community, and works tirelessly to protect our Cape Cod waters. He’s funny and good-natured and smart, and he throws a mean lamb roast every spring. We’re happy and lucky to count him and his wife, Elsa, among our friends.

Andre, ready to pull

Andre learned to handle a gun when he was eight years old. That’s when his father gave him a wooden shotgun and let him come out on hunts. He carried that gun for four years. Four years! It was only when he was twelve, and had proven to his father’s satisfaction that he could handle a gun safely, that he got his first real one – a 410.

What Andre learned as a child I have to learn as an adult, and when I have a gun in my hands I repeat to myself, over and over, always point the muzzle in a safe direction. If you do that, you’re likely to achieve the single most important goal of hunting: don’t shoot anyone.

That’s necessary for a good hunt, but it’s really not sufficient. If you’re going to be satisfied with your hunting experience, you probably need to actually bring down your quarry. Which brings us to the second important hunting skill: marksmanship.

Kevin learned to shoot when he was in his twenties, and he’s good. He took his Browning Citori 12-gauge (a beautiful gun) to the range yesterday, and he was up first. He must have hit nine out of the first ten, and that’s after not having held a gun for a good six months.

“You’re a good shot,” Andre said, clearly impressed. (It’s very satisfying to impress Andre.)

Then it was my turn. While I didn’t disgrace myself, I probably only hit about three or four of the first ten, and they were the easy ones – thrown from behind me and going away from me. I struggled more when I moved to side of the range and had to shoot targets that were going across my field of view.

Andre helped me figure out that I was making a couple of fundamental mistakes. For starters, I was tracking the target with the gun so the muzzle was always a little below. What you’re supposed to do is cover the target with the muzzle. If you can see the clay (or the bird) hovering over the bead on your gun, you’re going to miss it low. Cover the target, and move with it as you shoot.

Kevin, much more comfortable with guns than I am

My biggest problem, though, was that I wasn’t mounting the gun to the same spot every time. The essence of marksmanship is consistency; if you don’t put the gun in the same place, you won’t get the same shot. Mounting a gun is like any other repetitive motion – a golf swing, a tennis serve, a rowing stroke – and the only way to get it right is to make your body learn it by doing it the same way over and over and over.

One of the reasons I was having particular trouble with the whole “same way” thing is because I happen to have a long neck. When you shoot, the butt of the gun rests against your shoulder, and your cheek rests on the top of the stock (the comb, it’s called), and those of us overendowed in the neck department have to do considerable scrunching to get both cheek and shoulder to where they need to be.

Fortunately, Holly of NorCal Cazadora is a fellow long-neck and wrote about the problem a couple months back, so I know I have options. Her solution was a stock with an adjustable comb, but I’m reluctant to go with a $250. solution for a gun that isn’t worth much more than that. There are, however, slip-on pads that raise the comb, and recoil pads that adjust so you can put the stock higher on your shoulder. Between the two of them, I’m hoping to get a more comfortable fit.

Once that’s done, it’s just a matter of making my forty-something-year-old body internalize the motion of putting the gun to the same spot on shoulder and cheek. I’ll be walking around our property with my shotgun (unloaded, of course), doing it over and over, hoping the practice will make it easier to do it right when an actual bird flies up.

All that, while not forgetting to always point the muzzle in a safe direction.

Since this is my first hunting season, I’m not expecting great things. I know it takes a long time to get proficient with a gun, even under ideal circumstances (i.e. youth). I hope, though, by the time I really do dodder into antiquity, to be able to say that I was a good hunter. Maybe I’ll even be able to say it in French.

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I wasn’t sure what to expect. Kevin’s experience with gun clubs wasn’t promising. He’d shot at clubs in Connecticut and on Long Island, and he hadn’t found the membership to be warm, fuzzy, and inviting. People didn’t talk, nobody offered to help, and members pretty much kept to themselves.

If those are the unwritten rules of gun clubs, the Bass River guys missed the meeting.

The club has both trap and skeet on the weekends, and we showed up yesterday morning, guns in tow. We walked into their field house, an oversize shed with a makeshift wood stove and a motley assortment of La-Z-Boys, several of them occupied by members.

Immediately, one of them stood up, introduced himself as Bill, and shook hands with us. Then he introduced the rest of the crowd. We said hello all around, and I told them I was a new shooter, with a brand new birthday shotgun I wanted to try out. They said, essentially, that I’d come to the right place.

It turned out that we weren’t wholly prepared. We didn’t have eye and ear protection. Not to worry, they had spares. We had the wrong kind of ammunition. No problem, we could swap it for some of theirs. I only had a choke for trap, and Kevin only had a choke for skeet (the choke tightens the shot pattern by narrowing the barrel at the end). Nothing they couldn’t work around.

Kevin told them that he’d wanted to bring me there in part because he didn’t want me to learn to shoot from him. If there was somebody there who was an experienced shooter who could come with us on our skeet round, that would be ideal.

“Everyone here is an experienced shooter,” Bill said, and Roger volunteered to help me.

Skeet and trap are both shotgun target sports. The basic difference is the angle at which the target, a bright orange frisbee-shaped clay disc, flies in relation to the shooter. In skeet, it can come toward you, go away from you, or cross directly in front of you. In trap, it always goes away from you, but you’re shooting over a longer distance.

Skeet was invented back in the 1920’s and, in 1926, Hunting and Fishing and National Sportsman magazines jointly sponsored a contest to name the game. The winner of the $100 prize was one Gertrude Hurlbutt, who is said to have derived “skeet” from skjuta, the Swedish for “shoot.” (I would have chosen a different entry, the more evocative “bang.”)

Bass River does skeet in the morning and trap in the afternoon on Sundays, and since it was still morning we did a round of skeet first. We walked up to the first station and Roger explained where I’d be standing, where the target would be coming from (the high house, behind me), and where, ideally, I’d shoot it.

He helped me position the gun properly on my shoulder and angle it so I’d be in the right position to take the shot. He let a practice target fly so I’d know its path. And then it was time to do it for real.

I mounted the gun, and I felt the adrenaline coursing as I said, “pull.” The target came into my field of view, and I shot my brand-new Remington 870 20-gauge for the first time.

I missed, of course.

“Don’t worry,” Roger said. “It takes a while to get the hang of it.”

I tried again, and missed again. And again.

Then we switched so the target would come from the low house, which was across the field. It would be coming toward me, from about the 2 o’clock position, and passing to my left. “Pull,” I said, trying to keep my eye on the target instead of the gun.

Miracle of miracles, I hit the thing.

“You got it!” Roger said.  He sounded genuinely pleased.

I got it. Of the twenty-five rounds, I hit exactly two clay targets. But two is a hell of a lot more encouraging than none, which is what I fully expected.

Kevin, who used to shoot quite regularly, was shaking off the rust of the last fifteen years and getting his gun legs back. At first he missed about half, but then he hit two doubles (two targets released simultaneously from different positions) in a row and his game was back on.

As we went through the round, Roger explained some of the basics of target shooting with a shotgun (handguns and rifles are different). Once you mount the gun properly, you’re not supposed to look at the little bead on the end of the barrel. You’re supposed to look at what you’re shooting, and track the target by using the gun as an extension of your body. “Be one with the gun,” he told me.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s like other athletic endeavors. You train your body to make the motion, and then you trust it to bring the golf club back to the ball, or pull the oar through the water, or hit the target with the shotgun. I have personal experience with trying to make golf clubs and oars do my bidding, and I’m told it’s the same with tennis racquets and baseball bats. My brother Aaron says pool cues are that way, too.

Aaron’s a very good pool player, and he got that way by playing all the time for several years. I’m a mediocre golfer, but I would be a terrible golfer if I hadn’t played all the time for several years. I’ve rowed a lot for a couple of years, and I’m finally seeing some improvement. The key to sports like this is practice.

I shot fifty rounds yesterday, twenty-five at skeet and twenty-five at trap. I did a little better with trap; I hit five or six of my twenty-five. In some ways, it’s a little intimidating to think that those are the first fifty of what have to be many thousands of shots if I expect to develop any kind of proficiency, but I’ve found that developing new skills is one of the most satisfying aspect of having uprooted myself from the city and done a lifestyle U-turn.

I watched as some of the Bass River regulars shot trap (they even let me push the button to pull the targets). It is a pleasure to see anything done well, and it wasn’t just that they hit bird after bird after bird. It was the efficiency of their motion, the confidence with which they handled weapons which, mishandled, can kill people.

I have a profound respect for skill. The freezerful of venison aside, if I’m going to shoot a gun, I want to shoot it well.

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Okay, it’s not quite a crewcut. Kathy, at Salon in the Mills, gave me about five haircuts over the space of an hour. Each, obviously, was shorter than the last. By the time we were done, I was down to just a couple of inches. But I may go back for cut number six, so the full-fledged crew isn’t out of the question.

The shotgun, a gift from Kevin, is most definitely a shotgun. After spending two hours with Bob at the gun counter at Bass Pro Shops, we chose a Remington 870 pump-action 20-gauge combo, which comes with a 20-inch rifled barrel for deer and a 26-inch smooth-bore barrel for birds.

Fortunately, my parents are helping me maintain my hold on civilization. They sent me a case of really good wine.

Happy birthday to me!

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Massachusetts law requires that, before you are permitted to buy a gun or possess one on public property, you must have a firearms permit. In order to get the permit, you have to take the hunter safety class.

The class runs some eighteen hours over several days, and covers all the topics you’d expect – firearm safety, gun laws, hunting basics – as well as some you wouldn’t. I enjoyed the module on orienteering, which had us navigating around the church graveyard with a compass.

All the instructors are volunteers, recruited from the community. They’re generally from the ranks of state and local agencies involved in environmental protection or law enforcement, but there are others as well. One such was a retired Air Force rifleman with extensive experience teaching firearm safety.

Bob’s module on the safe handling of guns ran four hours. He spent the first three handing a wide variety of guns around the class, explaining how they work and how to use them and store them properly. Then, with an hour to go, he put the guns away and set up an easel with a pad of flipcharts on it. Because Kevin had already taken the class, I knew what was coming.

“How many people here are members of the National Rifle Association?” he asked. About three-quarters of the people in the room raised their hands. He asked about other gun-rights organizations and expressed satisfaction about the high level of participation.

Then he moved on to the other end of the spectrum. “Are there any lawyers here?”

No hands went up.

“Any reporters?”

Again, no hands.

“Good.” He flipped to the first chart, which had the text of the Second Amendment

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

He glossed over that troublesome first part and then launched into an hour-long screed on Americans’ inviolable right to own guns. He quoted Aristotle. He quoted Charlton Heston. He made the case that firearm ownership is the only hedge we have against tyranny. He even raised the specter of communism, establishing himself as the last man standing in opposition to the Red Menace.

He had choice words for Obama, for liberals, and for PETA. The gun control lobby was peopled by people who don’t understand the fragile nature of democracy, and who clearly can’t read. What part of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” do they not understand?

Kevin warned me that I’d have to keep my mouth shut during this presentation, but that wasn’t a problem. Engaging zealots is generally counterproductive, and it isn’t even fun. Besides, here’s a guy who has spent a lifetime developing a skill, and from whom I learned a lot. I honor his service to our country and I appreciate the time he spends teaching the class. As a firearms expert, he’s clearly formidable. To take issue with his constitutional scholarship seemed beside the point.

Although the maddeningly enigmatic Second Amendment is the rallying cry of the pro-gun contingent, I haven’t found a single solitary soul who believes that the right of the people to keep and bear arms should literally not be infringed. Even people who think Americans ought to be able to keep and bear assault weapons draw the line somewhere. Rocket launcher? Nuclear warhead?

Likewise, I don’t know anyone who favors an absolute ban on all firearms (at least, I don’t think I do – I haven’t polled my entire acquaintance). Bob’s tree-hugging, PETA-joining, Constitution-flouting antis don’t resemble the gun-control advocates I know. They’re just Bob’s straw men, set up so he can rail against the lunatic left, all the while breathing life into the stereotype of the lunatic right.

In my experience, most gun-control discussions don’t involve lunatics on either end. It’s never All Guns vs. No Guns. It’s about the degree of infringement on the right to bear them.

The article of faith for me is that more infringement is better. I think guns and firearms licenses should be difficult to get, which is why I didn’t mind schlepping to Dennis for five evening classes. I think all guns should be registered, and some kinds of guns should be flat-out banned. Handguns are the type used in the vast majority of gun crimes (the DOJ says upwards of eighty percent), and I think there’s a strong practical case (although a shaky constitutional one) to be made that they should be the exclusive province of law enforcement and the military.

But you don’t have to be a lunatic to take it as an article of faith that less infringement is better. The class was certainly a less-infringement crowd, but not everyone bought into Bob’s presentation, which happened to be given on the same night as the State of the Union. The next day, the guy sitting next to me, a funny, good-natured firefighter from Yarmouth, told me he ran a tape of Obama’s speech in a continuous loop for 24 hours as a kind of detox.

No matter what the tree-hugging, PETA-joining, Constitution-flouting anti-gun nuts tell you, the NRA isn’t populated exclusively by lawyer-hating, Heston-quoting, communist-fearing pro-gun nuts.

Most people in the class seemed to have grown up in a gun culture, enjoyed hunting, and took firearms ownership seriously There was the one teenager who smirked a lot and doodled “Kill! Kill!” on his class notes (yikes!), but almost everyone else in the room seemed to pay attention, to ask sensible questions, and to be committed to handling firearms safely and responsibly.

I ate donuts with them on the breaks. I made jokes with them during the boring parts. They weren’t the stuff that straw men are made of.

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