Grandma’s garden came first. And so, every month or so, I’d grab the Springfield and a box of shells and head into the knee-high Johnson grass beyond the garden to a level spot under the dead oak tree out in the middle of the field.
The tree was a monster; it had been out there forever. Lightning had struck it once or twice, and the branches grew out into the clouds in dizzying, twisted patterns because of the jolt. I don’t know what finally killed it. I like to think it was old age. It had been dead a couple of years now. The tree had also survived a few grass fires, and I could just make out the dim lines at various points along the thick trunk that spoke of floods in years past. Some of these lines were above my head.
About sixty yards past the tree to the north, the field dropped into a dry creek bed, nothing more than gray gravel and red mud. I’d never seen any water come down the creek, just puddles that collected after heavy rains. The foothills rose on the other side of the creek bed. This was where the squirrels lived. Over the years, before they built thedam and created the Stony Gorge reservoir, the creek had sliced chunks of the hills away, and now crumbling dirt cliffs rose out of the gravel, some nearly twenty to thirty feet high. Giant colonies of squirrels, some numbering into the hundreds, maybe even thousands, lived in there, in complicated mazes of holes that periodically opened out into the dirt face of the cliff. And there, when I walked out to the old oak tree, was where they died.
I leaned the rifle against the tree and studied the sky. No rain yet, but plenty of fat, angry clouds rolled across the low sky. I squatted down and got comfortable, mashing the tall grass down to form a cushion, my back to the tree, dirt cliff slightly off to my left. Sometimes, just to make things interesting and give the squirrels a sporting chance, I’d shoot standing, or off-hand as the old-timers called it, but today I was too damn tired and in too much of a hurry. I just wanted to kill a few squirrels and get to work before Fat Ernst got mad. Again.
I settled into the grass, feet planted firmly, knees bent at a 45-degree angle. If the holes in the cliff were at twelve o’clock, then I faced more or less toward the two o’clock mark. You always turn a little sideways to what you’re shooting so you can support the gun easier. If you face the target head on, then your left arm has to hang way out there, holding on to the end of the forestock, supporting the barrel. You can’t keep it steady. But if you turn sideways a little, then the rifle is resting across your chest, allowing you to draw your left arm in a little, so you can brace that elbow on something like, say, your knee if you’re sitting.
The key to holding any gun steady is in your posture. The idea is to build a series of solid supports, using your bones, locking them into place, from the ground up to the gun. I don’t care how strong you are, holding a rifle steady only using your muscles while firing at a target a hundred yards out is damn near impossible. You’ll shake too much. You need to relax those muscles, you need to be calm, breathing nice and slow and relaxed. Even your pulse can throw off your aim. It doesn’t have to be much. Moving the barrel a fraction of an inch could translate into missing the target by nearly a foot at a hundred yards.
My grandfather taught me everything about shooting. I can remember starting with a .22 when I was six, shooting at paper plates nailed to fence posts, then moving on up through .410 shotguns, and finally into larger rifles and shotguns like his 12 gauge pump Winchester and a .484 Remington. One summer evening, when the blazing sun had dropped halfway behind the coastal range to the west, when Grandpa and me were sitting under the same oak tree, watching for squirrels, he told me, “A gun is nothing more than a tool, but don’t forget that it’s nothing less than a tool either. Like any tool, a gun is only as smart as the person wielding it, but if you know what you’re doing, then a tool can move mountains. Squeezing the trigger is nothing less than imposing your will on the universe.”
I rested the rifle across my knees and fed five shells into the clip, loading them from the top, forcing them into the slot until I heard the click of the spring locking into place. When the clip was full, I took a deep breath, readjusted my knees slightly, and brought the binoculars up to my eyes, letting the air in my lungs out slowly and evenly.
The cliff face leapt into view with startling clarity. Sure enough, the squirrels were out and about, busily scurrying from one hole to the next in a flurry of motion one second, the next second freezing, watching, and listening—then another blur of motion. The trick was to nail them when they stopped to listen for predators. I suppose that’s kind of ironic, but they were just too damn hard to hit when they were moving. You had to factor in lead time and wind and all kinds of other damn things, and when I was pressed for time, I simply shot them when they were still.
The squirrels were all over the place. I could easily find them with my naked eyes, so I dropped the binoculars back to my chest, took another deep breath—settling in now, focusing my energy, quieting everything else down—and brought the rifle up to my shoulder. I pulled it in snug, because a 30.06 kicks like a mule that’s just been blinded with a faceful of pepper spray. You don’t really stop the recoil so much as rideit, guide it. I never braced myself against the tree, putting my shoulder between the stock and the trunk of the tree—I’d end up dislocating my shoulder or worse.
Grandpa used to tell me a story about this one time Earl Johnson came by the gun range. Earl was in his twenties. He was one tough customer, wearing brand-spanking-new hunting gear, boots, jeans, a giant cowboy hat. He wanted to sight in his new deer rifle, some ungodly huge .50 caliber Weatherby that had been built for the sole purpose of killing elephants. Grandpa strongly suggested that Earl might want to use a shooting bench, but the great white hunter knew what he was doing, dammit, he didn’t need to be treated like some goddamn woman.
Earl eased into a prone position, took his time settling down, getting the rifle with its huge barrel into place, and finally pulled the trigger. After the smoke cleared and the echoing thunder died, Grandpa found Earl whimpering in pain. The recoil had been powerful enough to drive him backward nearly a foot. The toes of his cowboy boots had left two neat grooves in the dirt, and the stock had broken Earl’s collarbone in two places.
I wedged my elbows into the slight indentations in my knees, the shallow groove right between my kneecap and the muscle on the inside of my leg, so the rifle was supported on the tripod I’d made with my skeleton. Two knees up to two elbows, with my shoulder as the third point in the triangle. The rifle slipped easily, naturally into place as if it knew where to go, as if it belonged there all along, as if it had never left my shoulder and cheek.
I sighted down the barrel, staring down between the notches in the iron sights, and everything else in the world fell away. Nothing else existed except myself, the rifle, and the squirrels. My breathing got even slower, deeper. The index finger of my right hand gently, ever so gently came to rest on the smooth trigger, almost as if there were an extremely rotten egg between the trigger and the guard and I was afraid of breaking the fragileshell. Then my eyes focused somewhere beyond the tip of the barrel, rushing forward across the field and coming to rest on the cliff face, alive with the motion of squirrels dashing from one hole to another.
A blur of brown fur scurried into my line of sight and froze, becoming a statue of a scraggly adult squirrel, ears up, mangy tail held high, claws clutching at the solid dirt. I swung the barrel slightly, until the notches lined up just behind the squirrel’s front shoulder. I held my breath, then let it out slow, slower still, until I wasn’t really breathing at all, and squeezed the trigger.