My first duck hunt in AR was a freebie, paid for by a seed company I did business with. I'd never shot steel in my life. I took a 26" barreled BSS choked IC and M. When we loaded up in the back of a pickup that first morning at the Hartz
Seed Co. lodge outside of Stuttgart I was the only one out of six not carrying a SBE or a long barreled O/U. One guy looked at my little double and said "You going to use that?
Six of us in the blind, I thought, as we waited for shooting light. How am I going to know if I actually killed a duck with 5 others shooting? I figured that only if I beat them to the draw would I know for sure. I decided to not shoot on the first flight that came in, so that I could observe how they came in, how things went in general. They blasted away at them killed two to three, and looked around at me still sitting down. "Why didn't you shoot?", they said. I answered that I thought there would be plenty more chances. I noticed that they came in from my end of the blind, and hoped the next bunch would. They did. I had my feet set properly to stand and take one short step while mounting my gun, my trigger finger alongside the trigger guard and my thumb on the safety. At the guides' call to "Kill 'em!" I jumped to my feet, dishragged a drake, then killed closest duck to him. I had two dead ducks in the air before anybody else got off a shot. The rest of the morning went like that. Nobody said another word about my little gun.
SRH
