Published: September 05, 2008 12:10 am            

I just missed a lot; no excuses

If facing and discussing your failures is therapeutic, as is widely held, I am prepared today to embrace some therapy. It is not the first time that the lowly mourning dove has embarrassed me. And opening day, such as was last Monday, is a typical day to find ones self missing shots far more than the national missing average.        

How many did I miss? I’ll try to get to that later. Let’s just say that for one who has shot the speedy birds in six states over a long shooting lifetime, amassing a lot of wingshooting experience, on Monday my shooting was pathetic; deplorable.

Now I forthrightly refuse to give excuses for my regrettable misses. I will not bring up my left eyed/right handed handicap. I am not a man of excuses. I can eat as much crow as anyone and would someone please pass the ketchup? The cross dominant handicap became less of a handicap when I developed histoplasmosis in both eyes in my 20s and the right eye was so damaged that a huge blind spot remains to this day. The blind area is as big as a Volkswagen at 10 yards and I barely can peep over it to see whatever it is I am looking at, or in this case shooting at. So changing over to shoot left handed was moving to my best eye anyway which happened to be my lead eye. It was just a matter of changing the way I had shouldered a gun for 15 years or so and I won’t use t hat trauma as an excuse for missing doves.

           

Seeing double

 

The disease left me with double vision, the left eye sees images (doves) one degree differently than the right eye sees them. But I usually can tell which dove of the two to shoot and so this will not be offered as an excuse either.

I noticed that I couldn’t see doves in flight this year that were over 100 yards distant, but I attribute that to the cloud cover and not to the naturally degeneration of my eyesight as recorded in my ophthalmologist’s records. I can see fine. No rationalizations here.

And I won’t bring up the large floater that swims around in my right eye. Even though it has appendages like a spider’s legs (or a dove’s wings) and “flies” across my visual “screen” every time I raise my shotgun. I can handle that and distinguish most of the time between the floater and a real dove. I noticed last Monday when looking skyward into the clouds that I have a rope-like floater in my left (shooting) eye as well. But incoming birds flew through the crisscrossing rope quite well and the distraction was minimal.

The numerous teeny weeny eye-floaters look only like distant doves and didn’t cause me to raise my shotgun. They only served to slightly raise my heartbeat and to set in motion insignificant little episodes of expectancy and disappointment. No problem.     

Nor will I offer my age of more than seven decades as having an effect on my shooting. I have hardly noticed the unsteadiness in my ankles, knees and hips. These joints ache and fail simply because of too much exercise and have nothing to do with arthritis. They gave way and I fell the other day only after I had simply lost my balance.

           

Busted thumb

 

Monday’s shooting was delayed only briefly when I somehow got my left thumb in the way of the barrel release lever when I touched off a load at a dove that twisted over my shoulder. The recoil caused the lever to split open my thumb and blood went all over my gear. I happened to have a first aid kit and, along with a frozen drink, I taped and cooled the damage to stop the bleeding.

The thumb could no longer operate the safety but changing over to my right shoulder solved that so that I could shoot the rest of the morning and all afternoon while properly using the safety and looking over the top of the big blind spot. This cannot be used as an excuse for missing so much because I shot right handed for many earlier years.

And just because the wind, which was the outer swirls of Hurricane Gustav, was bending the tall grass over to the ground and doves were riding it into my spot darting and weaving to show off is no reason to miss, right? Even though when they reached my woods line, the survivors had been shot at numerous times and had moved into overdrive.  No complaints here.

No sir. Not me. No excuses will I make. I refuse to raise the foregoing issues. I’ll take my lumps. I should have hit a bird with every shot.

(Note to the reader: All of the above conditions and events are true. And the doves I killed numbered … well, lets just say the number was the same as the number I ate at the barbeque.)

        

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