Practice makes perfectly okay
By Nick Simonson
There are few hunters that I envy. Content with the options I have close to home for the limited species I pursue each fall with the time I can muster, I enjoy the success and adventures of my friends and relish hearing their stories from far off places or lucky tag draws when we meet up for a reunion around a summer campfire or when hunched
over a set of ice holes in the winter following the season. Even complete strangers who email me out of the blue with their tales light up my screen with text as I scramble
to get every word in and their stories of success set my imagination ablaze with ideas of western trips or adventures to the far north that I’ll never take. In their amazing success, I find joy. There is one hunter that I do envy, however, and that is the one seemingly born with an innate ability to hit anything he or she sees in the field. I’ve watched as
a buddy blasted offhand a sprinting buck at 300 yards in the fading light of the opening day of deer season to fill his tag in mind-blowing fashion. My jaw has dropped as a friend tripled on roosters in the time it took the rest of the hunting party to shout out the first syllable of the birds’ identification in the field. For these gentlemen, and a handful of
others for which my admiration and admitted jealousy are frequently shared, who through either their genetic makeup or the years spent from age two on up plinking cans in the back yard and rabbits on the back forty, are always on the mark. Admittedly, those who grew up with a .22 in their hands have a distinct advantage over a non-traditional hunter like me that didn’t pick up a gun until the same age as the caliber of rimfire rifle that likely replaced a baby rattle in their cribs.
