Pun, courtesy of Blair, my wife:
"So when you shoot at a bird are you going to say a Quail Mary?"
Quick response from me:
"Only if I pull a Cheney." (Readers will recall that the Vice President was hunting quail when he shot a fellow hunter.)
Such are the thoughts that run through my mind in the run-up to my first quail hunt. Thoughts like Bobwhite is a beautiful word. And How do you turn the safety on again?
In advance of the trip, I'm now two Sundays into remedial shooting lessons. You might think that a son of the Deep South, born and raised in the country, would know how to handle a gun. But my father wasn't a hunter. And, at age eight, I witnessed a shooting accident. So I'd never advanced beyond BBs and pellets.
First time, I tried a twenty-gauge Beretta, an over and under. (The over and under refers to the placement of the two barrels.) A friend took me out. We shot at orange clays that he launched from a trailer hitch-mounted catapult. I missed the first 20. But by the time 50 had lifted into the air, I was popping one out of every six and wondering what it would be like to shoot at a real live bird.
By lesson two, I had grown accustomed to the recoil of the shotgun, to the pound of the stock against my shoulder. I came to appreciate the unnatural quiet that followed a blast and the smell of gunpowder wafting in the afternoon breeze. I wasn't exactly bloodthirsty, but I was keen to try my hand at shooting down my dinner. And I had taken to returning again and again to the webpage for Gillionville, the south Georgia plantation where I will shortly sight and shoot at my first quail.
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