How Col. Tom Kelly Taught His Daughter to Shoot a Shotgun, and Doves

This story, “Sweet Dove of Youth,” appeared in the February 1979 issue of Outdoor Life. Col. Tom Kelly is best known for his classic 1973 book on turkey hunting, “The Tenth Legion.” He was also a diehard dove hunter.

He bought the gun for the child a month before her 10th birthday and brought it home to a concerted gasp of outrage and indignation from every female relative on either side of the family. He bought it and delivered it early because the child had had the particular bad luck to have been born three weeks after the usual opening of the first half of the dove season.

The presentation, accompanied by the obligatory lecture, was made with some solemnity and ceremony that was in no way inappropriate.

The lecture was obligatory for a number of reasons. For openers, a first shotgun newly taken from the factory is nothing less than a piece of pure delight. The mellow tone of the wooden stock and the muted blue of the steel complement one another exactly. The feel of the grip and the trigger under the hand is simply marvelous. The pressure of the comb of the stock on the cheekbone when the gun is thrown up triggers something primitive that bubbles underneath our thin veneer of cultivation and polish. It is difficult for a child of 10 to understand that this machine is as deadly as it is beautiful. It is even more difficult for the same child to realize that the owner of the weapon must furnish the brains for both. A child has dif­ficulty, as well, understanding that there are no second chances and being sorry later will not reconstitute the dog or the man — the life — that the gun has shattered.

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There is, moreover, a handicap now that has never existed pre­viously. In our brave new world, the average 10-year-old has seen more individual combat with small arms than the average veteran of several major battles. All of this, however, has been good, clean violence — the televised violence of cowboy movies and gangster pictures.

Nobody on “our” side ever gets killed in one of these epics, except the second lead or a few of those faceless nobodies in the very last row of the extras platoon. The bad guys drop instantly when fired at by a handgun at a range of 100 yards. Persons who are wounded either • flinch and then manfully complete the line they were in the process of delivering or fall gracefully onto something soft. They never drop face first onto rocks or into the mud. These same wounded invari­ably re-appear two reels later with some sort of heroic bandage on one of their minor appendages and take up the thread of the story. The child, naturally enough, gets a com­pletely erroneous picture of gunshot wounds, especially those caused by a shotgun at close range.

The man had begun his effort to fill in this gap in the child’s under­ standing the season before, the day he shot the beer can.

She had been serving her final tour of duty that year as “pick-up man,” and the two of them had been sitting near a fencerow of bushy water oaks waiting for the afternoon flight. He had been explaining why she was too little to own a gun, and in the middle of the conversation he had walked back into the fencerow, found an abandoned beer can, put it down on the ground 10 feet from the stool, and still talking, lined the gun up from the hip and pulled the trigger.

The can was blown backwards 20 feet in a cloud of dirt and dead leaves, and the girl fell off her stool, in shock. He sent her out to get the can, and when she had come back and was sitting down poking her fingers through the ragged holes in its sides, he had talked with cold­ blooded deliberation about what those holes would look like in a man.

At least some of it stuck.

From time to time during the balance of the afternoon, she had picked up the can and fingered the holes thoughtfully.

The presentation lecture, then, was the logical culmination of the first phase of the safety orientation.

A word or two about pick-up men.

Pick-up man is a generic term, irrespective of the sex of the individ­ual concerned, to describe those young children who accompany rela­tives to retrieve downed birds.

The life of a pick-up man is, by and large, roses, roses all the way. The sprigs of yew come later.

To begin with, if they start young, and it is not uncommon to see pick­ up men aged six working at the trade, they come to their work supervised by a doting relative. The father or grandfather or uncle usually goes into the field loaded with enough stools, iced lemonade in thermos bot­tles, cookies, apples and other mis­cellaneous impediments to partially re-supply a squad of riflemen. The pick-up man gets to see a lot of birds, begins to get some idea of ranges and shot patterns, and with experience becomes a real help on doubles.

Some of them, depending on the skill level of the relative they happen to pick up for the most, become a little obnoxious. There are few things in life quite so aggravating as having a piping seven-year-old treble point out to you after you have just missed both halves of an easy double that grandfather would have killed both birds. There is a distinct desire at this point to stop shooting doves and try a little child abuse.

The pick-up man gets the feel and flavor of the sport at an early age. It makes him want to play a hand himself.

I understand that there are states in this country that forbid hunting altogether until an individual is 16 years old.

Such laws are nothing less than barbarous.

Mel Ott reported to the New York Giants at 15. At 16, Alexander the Great had already led Philip’s caval­ry at Chaeronea, and at 17 Joan of Arc had raised the Siege of Orleans.

A 16-year-old boy is already con­cerned with girls and cars, and God alone knows what 16-year-old girls are thinking of. Hunting is one of the few activities of man that can be as enjoyable at 10 as it is at 80. To deny a child the first five or six years of this pleasure, if it is conducted in the presence of a responsible adult who willingly accepts accountability, is a remarkable example of our tendency to elect interfering officials.

But I grow waspish.

The transition from pick-up man to bird shooter is rarely easy. A pick­ up man has seen shooting that is often the result of years of trial and error, and if he has worked for a good shot, he has seen shooting that looked, effortless. It may have looked that way, but it wasn’t. There are few acts in sport as difficult as wingshooting, for in wingshooting you cannot see the magnitude of your errors or the direction in which you have erred. There are no replays of game films to help you, either. Only on ducks flying very close to the surface of the water can the strike of the shot pattern be seen. When the bird is aloft, either it falls at the shot or it doesn’t, and there is no way to tell where the shot pattern went when the duck doesn’t fall. Someone can sit behind the gunner and look down the line of metal and tell. But the shooter, unless he is very practiced and experienced, can almost never do it.

In turning a pick-up man into a bird shooter, you are particularly handicapped if the child is naturally competitive and has been exposed to good shooting over a period of two or three years. He expects, by instinct, to be able to shoot as well as the relative he has been watching.

Along this path of roses, this lane from spectator to active participant, there are veritable hedges of yew, let alone sprigs, and it was down this path that the man now proposed to lead the girl.

The early stages of the transition were outstanding successes, as they almost always are. She shot at tin cans and at pine cones. He borrowed a portable trap thrower and bought two cases of clay targets, and she began to have some hits on outgoing birds. The trap can be set at slow speed and arranged in front of the gun so that outgoers appear almost stationary. They are moving towards the outer limits of the pattern, but no deflection is required. She had pro­gressed to the point where she was standing slightly to the side, and the bird was requiring a slight lead when the season opened.

And at this point, because she wanted to hunt so badly, they dis­pensed with the balance of the train­ing program, and he threw a half­ trained shooter into the line.

The first afternoon, he very nearly got away with it.

The first half of the dove season in Alabama opens about the first of October. In the southern part of the state, it is still summer. There is not a leaf yet turned except walnut (which leafs out in April and turns yellow in September and leaves you wondering how it has had time to grow at all), a few black gum and sassafras, and part of the sumac. Seventy-odd years ago hunters shot summer ducks on this coast-wood ducks-often in conjunction with Fourth of July bar­becues. It is hard to see how a summer duck shoot could have been a hotter sport than first-week-of-the­ season dove hunts. Birds fly slowly during the first few days, there is seldom any wind, and some of the late hatch still have pinfeathers under the outer coat.

On her first trip, with her new gun, in the first 20 minutes of the hunt, she killed the second bird she shot at. It was a crossing shot, left to right, and was at the outer limit of her range. The bird went down on a long slant and fell in a clump of trees grown up around a pile of tree tops at the head of a shallow draw. The man went in through the screen of briars and burrowed under the pile of tops with visions of rattlesnakes dancing in his head while she stood outside the tangle and gave advice. He found the bird and came out and handed it to her, and she put her gun down to take the bird in both her hands. He was grinning so hard his face hurt and he said, “I don’t know how many more you are going to kill in your whole life, but I’m glad I got to watch you kill the first one.” And she answered, “So am I.”

She killed two more birds while she was going through three-quarters of a box of shells. The first was an incomer that folded and bounced when it hit, and the second was a crossing shot that was scratched down with a broken wing tip. She should only have been credited with 10 percent of a kill. The man had to chase the bird a quarter of a mile across the field after it came down.

He never did fire his gun. He sat behind her all afternoon with his gun on the ground behind them and looked down her barrel while she shot. He talked about sitting still at the right times and about not getting up until the bird was in range. He picked on her a little bit about range in an attempt to fix distances in her mind. He told her that the only people who kill fewer doves than the people who shoot them out of range are the ones who stay home. Only one time did he have to call her attention to where she was pointing the muzzle of her gun.

The afternoon, delicious as it was, was topped by the walk back to the vehicles, the tailgate discussions of the shoot, and the generous com­ments about her three birds. And when she found that there was a boy of 11 on the hunt who was also in the early stages of his transition period and had only killed two, she was jubilant.

But the next Saturday afternoon, all the percentages caught up with them.

During the week a cold front had gone through. Early in October there is seldom any sting to cold fronts here, but after the two days of rain the wind shifts to the Northwest, the sky clears, and the wind drives along at 20 to 25 knots. Such a wind under the tail of a 50 mile-an-hour dove that has just been shot at twice is going to keep you off balance a lot. You are going to have trouble even if you have been killing the limit out of a box of shells since you were 15.

If you are a week short of 10, and the sum total of your experience consists of 16 tin cans, a case-and-a­ half of Blue Rock targets, and three doves, you are dead. The hammer has already fallen, but you just don’t know it yet.

Driving up in the car, she prattled on about how many birds there might be in the field and asked him if he thought the change in the weather might make them fly earlier. She also asked, twice, how long he thought she would have to hunt before she had a day on which she killed the limit. He evaded this question with paternalistic platitudes, none of which were satisfactory. The closer they got to the field and the harder the wind blew, the more pronounced became his sense of impending doom. He alluded to the wind from time to time in an attempt to lay the groundwork for what he was con­vinced was going to happen after they got there, but the allusions passed six feet over her head. A competitive athlete thinks he can hit .350 against a cannon on the best day the cannon ever had.

When the hunt gathered at the northeast corner of the field to discuss who was going to stand where, the wind was gusting to 25 knots. The two of them walked out into the field and got set up with the man sitting behind her, as he had done before. He told her it was going to be a lot tougher than it had been the previous week, but before he could complete the explanation, dis­aster had already fallen upon them.

The first bird was not a single but was part of a flight of 30 that came over the trees. The birds were right down on the tops of the cornstalks before she saw them. She got her gun up, took a moment to pick out the bird she intended to shoot, and before she could swing past it, the flock was gone, twisting and rolling from side to side in the wind. She didn’t get to pull the trigger.

She got the gun up earlier on the next two birds and got off shots at each that were completely hopeless. The muzzle was not pointed any­ where near the bird when she pulled the trigger. The next flock, another big one, was on them and gone so quickly that she could only throw a hopeless shot after them as they went by. Then an incomer got in so fast that she shot straight up as he went by and would have fallen off the stool if the man had not caught her. By the time she had missed six or eight she was completely outclassed, her confidence was gone, and she simply went to pieces.

He tried everything he could think of to help her out. He made her let several birds go by and had her swing at them without shooting. He knelt in front of her and killed one to give her some idea of barrel speed. He had her wait for an upwind bird, but by then her timing was so far off that she shot as far in front of this one as she had been shooting behind the downwind birds.

She got madder and madder, and when she had gone through the first box of shells and had not so much as made one flinch, he delivered what she considered to be the final insult.

He suggested that they leave their stand and go down to the end of the field and shoot some out of the pecan trees. An occasional bird was lighting down there before pitching down into an adjoining field. This straw crippled the camel.

They said things to each other that, if they had been husband and wife rather than father and daughter, would have created a coolness at the breakfast table that would have lasted for the next two weeks. She said she was sorry she had come, that she was never going to come again, that she quit, and that she wanted to be taken home. He told her that she could quit if she felt like it, but that he was not ready to go, that the hunt wasn’t over, and that if she felt that way, she could just go and sit in the car until he was ready to leave. She got up and gathered up the balance of her shells and her stool, and with her back rigid with disapproval, she marched across the field alone and sat in the car.

The flight went on as briskly as before, and he stayed out there by himself and killed a half-dozen birds, but there was not a bit of juice in it. Every time he looked over at the end of the field, he could see her sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck swinging her legs or wandering around the cars. He finally got up and walked over to where she was sitting. She asked him, without look­ ing up, “What am I going to say when somebody asks me how many I killed?”

And he answered, “You are going to say, ‘I didn’t cut a feather.’ Don’t you know you are not the first person who ever had this happen to him?”

Her head came up and she looked at him and said, “Do we have to wait until they come and ask? Can’t we just leave now?”

He told her they probably wouldn’t ask and if they didn’t she needn’t volunteer. He told her they could leave a little early.

They went, together, and hunted up the host and thanked him for the shoot. The host, who could tell by the girl’s face what had happened, spent some time apologizing for the wind and talking about how very likely nobody had killed many. Tell­ing one of those gentlemanly lies that God would reward him for later, he said he had only killed two himself.

They loaded the car and left while the flight was still going on and before the balance of the hunt could gather at the fence corner for the post-mortems. When they had driven 15 miles in silence, he looked over at the girl and said, “Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.”

By the time they crossed the Mon­roe County line, they had partially made up and she was talking again. About inconsequentials. At the Pine Log Creek hill she asked him to tell her what had happened.

His answer began at Major’s Creek and lasted all the way to White Horse Cross roads. The answer turned from instruction into dialogue, and her questions began to get con­crete.

She made a statement about what was going to happen next time.

The man said, “Oh! I take it then that you have withdrawn your state­ment of resignation?”

And the girl answered, “I only said I quit because I was mad. You know what I say when I am mad don’t count. I am going to learn how to do this if it is the last thing I ever do.”

“You are going to learn it,” coun­tered the man, “but it is not going to be the last thing you ever do, and if you approach it as a competitive exercise, you are making a mistake. If we just wanted to kill something we could have bought a box of chick­ens and turned them loose in the backyard and hit them in the head with sticks. The quicker you learn that you don’t go hunting simply to kill something, the better off you are going to be.”

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She accepted this in silence but with a peculiar look around the mouth. He knew there was going to be a protracted session of question and answer about it later on.

He picked the doves out in the yard. between sips of his drink, with the comfortable conviction that he had made a convert.