Many scientific calculations have been made with a view to improving the shooting of sportsmen, or at least of interesting them. Two, which are in theory unassailable, have appeared very often indeed in the unanswerable form of figures and measurements, and nevertheless they are both misleading, and even wrong, in the crude form in which they have been left. One of these is based on the calculation that the shot and the game can only meet provided a certain fixed allowance in front of moving game is given. The calculations are quite correct, but they have no application to sport, for the simple reason that they neglect to calculate the reduction of the theoretical allowance in front, supposed to be necessary, but not all imperative because of the swing of the gun. In other words, the gunner, however expert he may be, does not know exactly where his gun points at the instant the tumbler falls, let alone the instant the shot leaves the barrel. Between the instant of pulling the trigger and the shot leaving the barrel a swinging gun will have moved some unknown distance, and this represents additional unobserved allowance. An inch of this movement at the muzzle of the gun becomes an allowance of 40 inches in as many yards of range. It will be necessary to refer to this unconscious allowance again directly, because it has a bearing upon the second oft-stated proposition.

It is this: mental perceptions in various individuals range from quick to slow, and besides this the muscular action due to mental orders and nerve impulses also range from slow to quick. Both these well-known facts are constantly asserted to necessitate an added allowance in front of game by the slow individual. In practice, however, these slow individuals never admit the yards of allowance that they are supposed to need to allow in front of fast crossing game. It has occurred to the author to question whether the man of slow perception and of slow muscular obedience does need to allow more than the quick individual. Probably it is exactly the reverse; and he has to see less space between the muzzle and the game than the quicker man and than he of what is mistakenly called less personal error.

The “personal error” seems to be in assuming that the slow individual does not subconsciously know his own speed, and compensate for it.

Apparently it is mistaken to place the actions of shooting in this or any other sequence of events. It is said, “You see the game, you aim, your eyes tell the brain your aim is true, your brain orders the muscles to let off the gun.” That is possibly correct for some people, but the author does not believe that any fast crossing game would ever be killed if it were so. His view is that there is the game; your brain now instructs two sets of muscles to move in different directions, one to move the gun and another to pull the trigger, and at the same time informs each how rapidly to act in order that lefthand gun-swing and right index-finger pressure may arrive precisely together. This is what is called hand and eye working together, but it should be hand and finger. The eye certainly may observe whether the two things have been done at the same instant of time, but when they have not there is no time for correction; all the eye can do is to inform the brain that the swing did not catch up before the gun was off, or the reverse, so that the brain may correct the missed timing for the next shot. It is necessary to observe that the finger pressure starts, as does the swing of the gun, before aim is completed, and that if the latter were got before the order to pull were given by the brain, it would be lost by the mere continued swing of the gun before the order could be executed.

What has to be considered, then, is what appears to the brain at the instant of discharge. The quicker the perception of things as they happen, the more space will be observed between the muzzle and the crossing bird as the gun races past the game. The slow perception will not observe that the gun has passed the bird when the explosion occurs, and this clearly accounts for some good shots declaring they never make any allowance for crossing game, but shoot “pretty much at ’em.” Of course they do nothing of the sort; but they tell you what they perceive. They do not observe that in the interval between pulling trigger and the shot leaving the barrel the gun has travelled past the game very considerably, and what they have observed is the relative position of gun and game at the time the trigger gave way. For their class of shooting, therefore, they must look for less daylight between gun and game than the person of quick perception, who sees most of what there is to observe.

The velocity of light is so much greater than the velocity of recoil, that it may be questioned, on that ground, whether this is the right explanation, on the assumption that only recoil would stop the perception of the relative positions of game and gun. But were it so, it is necessary to remember that the velocity of light has no relationship to the velocity of brain perception through the eyes.

But probably recoil has nothing to do with the matter for the man of slow perception, and to him the discharge is done with as soon as the trigger gives way. It appears, then, that the slower brain perception is through the eyes, the less observed allowance a swinging gun will require.

Is it possible to shoot fast crossing game without a swinging gun? For an answer to this, the author has tried to come back from the first shot to meet flying game behind with the second barrel, but has found it impossible to kill. Here the swing is in the opposite direction to the movement of the game, and it invariably carries the shot behind the game. Assuming it to be possible (as it is) to throw up the gun to a point of aim at which game and shot will intercept each other, the gun is mostly, possibly always, given a swing in the direction of the game’s movement by the mere act of presenting. That is to say, the shooter is raising his gun from a position more or less in the direction of the game when he starts the movement, and as the game is not there when the explosion occurs it is obvious that the gun has done some swinging, possibly unknown to the shooter.

Much reliance upon this kind of racing with the game has its disadvantages as well as its advantages. It reduces the necessity for accurate judgment of speed of game to a minimum. That is to say, if the gun races the game, and gets ahead of it unobserved by the shooter, the pace of the gun is set by the pace of the game, and the unobserved allowance ahead is also, and consequently, automatically adjusted by the game itself—that is, by its angle and its speed.

But this method of shooting takes no account of the height of the game, and possibly this is one reason why high pheasants are so very difficult to many excellent marksmen at lower birds.

The pace of game high and low being the same, it is, relatively to the movement of the gun, slower according as distance increases. If the gun muzzle has to move 5 feet a second to get ahead of game crossing at 20 yards away, it need move but 2½ feet per second to get ahead of game 40 yards away and moving at the same velocity. Consequently, when the whole allowance is given unconsciously by swing, and is just enough at 20 yards, it is clear that the same swing will only give the same unconscious allowance at 40 yards, and that this will not be half enough at that range, where the pellets are travelling slower and have double the distance to go.

For this reason, in theory—and the author’s experience supports theory in this case—it is better to make an allowance in front of all game, in addition to swing, and to increase the allowance very much for long ranges. To reduce theory to practice: with a swing to the gun automatically set by the speed of the bird, the author would find it necessary to allow 3 yards ahead of game at 40 yards, whereas the same game at the same speed would not have more than 2 feet allowance at 20 yards. But as all game varies in speed, and as all shooters see what they do differently, this has no educational value for anyone, except so far as it sets out a principle that has not hitherto been dealt with, except in some newspaper articles—namely, the principle that swing regulated automatically by the pace of the bird has more effect at short range than at long range. This is so whether the nature of the swing is merely to follow and catch the game, or to race it and get past it, or to race past it to a selected point or distance in front.

To attempt to bring home this truth to those who do not agree with these remarks, it may be expedient to point out that they explain a very common experience. One sometimes gives ample apparent allowance in front of a crossing bird, and shoots well behind him; then, with the second barrel, one races to catch him before he disappears over a hedge, fires apparently a foot or a yard before the game is caught up, and nevertheless kills dead.

The judgment of speed is not very important if one allows the speed of the game to regulate the rate of the swinging gun, and although it is frequently discussed as if no one could shoot well without a perfect knowledge of speed, it seems doubtful whether it is necessary to worry about it, when the act of getting on the game is really an automatic regulation of swinging to the movement of the bird.

But as there are very likely some shooters who would like to be able to calculate speed as accurately as may be, here is a plan which is never very much out for heavy short-winged game, such as pheasants, partridges, grouse, black game, and wild duck of kinds.

Estimate the height of the game at the moment it was shot, then measure, by stepping, the distance the dead (not wounded) bird travels before it touches the flat ground. Air resistance to the fall of the bird will be practically just equal to air resistance to its onward movement after it is dead, and the time it takes to fall, and necessarily also to go forward the measured distance, are the same. The time taken for the fall may be safely calculated by the height in feet divided by 16, and the square root of the dividend is the number of seconds of the fall. Thus, if the bird falls 64 feet, then 64
16 = 4, and the square root of 4 is 2 seconds. In 3 seconds the game falls 48 yards, so that practically all pheasants take between 2 and 3 seconds to fall, or ought to do so.

The velocity the bird is travelling before being shot does not affect the time it takes to reach the ground, but wind, with or against the game, slightly alters the distance it goes forward after being killed. With the wind the game will always be going faster than the air, and will therefore be getting air resistance from the front, and the method only partially breaks down when a heavy wind is blowing directly against the game.