Part 12

It may be said that it is not easy to keep the gun in the direction of the line of flight, but the author cannot agree to that, except when the game swerves after the “let off.” If it does that, a spread of shot the size of a barn door would probably miss it, and the one-third bigger lateral spread of the cylinder than of the choke bore will not assist once in a hundred times.

These views, although not perhaps expressed, are largely acted upon in practice. Soon after choke-bore guns came in they became very unfashionable for game shooting, and the author was himself dreadfully unfortunate, for his form dropped 50 per cent. But the reason was that his first choke bores were not central shooters, and it was then very difficult to get guns of that boring that were true. That it was no fault of choke bores as such, the author proved by having his guns rebored, and although they afterwards shot even closer than before, they killed in the new condition.

One fault which is very bad in choke bores, and counts against shooting straight-going and straight-coming game well, far more than with cylinders, is that of patches without any shot in them in the outer edge of the circle. What is meant here is not a misdirection of the load but an erratic spread of it. In a close-shooting weapon this fault is almost as bad as a misdirection, but differs in this, that the patch varies its position with each shot. These patches sometimes extend from the outer edge to very nearly the centre of the pattern, and consistent shooting when they occur is impossible. They are not chance happenings, and can be obviated by good boring and good loading. The author thinks they most often occur when the shot can be shaken in the cartridge, and it may be that a size of pellets which do not lie evenly on the outer circle on the wad assist in deforming the pattern.

But theory is of no use, and it is the gun-maker’s business to sell a gun that he can show has none of these faults. Whether he overcomes them by a change in size of shot, quantity of them, or in an alteration of brand of powder, matters nothing to the shooter, and is not his affair. Enough has been said when the gun-buyer is placed in a position that it took the author many years to arrive at in regard to the choke bore, namely, that everything on the plate that is bad is not the fault of the shooter, but of the gun-maker.

There is another advantage of the choke bore. It shoots No. 5 shot at 50 yards as hard as No. 6 is shot by a cylinder at 40 yards, and the pattern will be quite equal at 50 yards with the large shot to that of the cylinder’s small shot at 40 yards.

This is very important in shooting at straight coming or going grouse. The farther off the first bird can be taken, the more certainly will the others be killed. No. 6 shot has enormous energy when the speed of a quick advancing bird is added to the speed of the shot. If it gets in the bird, it will go a long way through him; but when grouse are coming low, and dead straight to the gun, they glance the small shot like a shower of hail upon a duck’s back. Consequently more heavy shot will get in, although fewer will hit.

The kind of gun to be bought can hardly be determined until the shooter has settled what size of pellets he wants to use at various game. Messrs. Kynoch sell more than twice as many No. 5 shot as any other size. No. 6 comes next, and Nos. 7 and 5½ are nowhere.

With a cylinder gun only placing 100 pellets of No. 6 shot in the 30 inch circle at 40 yards, one could not expect great work from No. 5 pellets on birds as small as partridges walked up. The pattern would be too open at 40 yards, and the penetration unnecessarily high at 25 yards.

Some, at least, of No. 6 shot has penetration for a slow partridge flying dead away at 40 yards. With a very quick driven bird shot at behind, it has not more than enough penetration beyond 30 yards. The pace of the retreating game reduces the energy of the impact, but there is very little glancing off the feathers when they are struck from behind. The author is inclined to say that in shooting coming game all glancing is away from the game, and from behind all glancing from feathers is into the bird. He has himself heard the clatter of the shot on a straight-coming duck at about 30 yards when no damage whatever was done. At a low skimming partridge coming straight for an open gateway in which the writer was standing, he has shot, as at a sitting mark, for there was neither swerve nor rise or fall; he has seen the earth kick up all round the bird at about 25 yards, and has not been any nearer bagging the game. Surely nothing but glancing shot can account for such escapes.

WARTER PRIORY. LORD SAVILE SHOOTING ]

┌──────┬─────┬──────┬───────────┬──────────┬──────┬────────┬────────┬──────┐ │1906. │ No. │ Name │Partridges.│Pheasants.│Hares.│Rabbits.│Various.│Total.│ │ │ of │ of │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │Guns.│Beat. │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├──────┼─────┼──────┼───────────┼──────────┼──────┼────────┼────────┼──────┤ │Dec. 4│ 8 │Blanch│ 91│ 657│ 574│ 139│ 2│ 1,463│ │ │ │Whin │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │Dec. 5│ 9 │Gold’n│ 15│ 3,824│ 526│ 92│ 3│ 4,460│ │ │ │Vall’y│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │Dec. 6│ 9 │High │ 11│ 3,037│ 182│ 42│ 2│ 3,274│ │ │ │Cliff │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ├──────┼─────┼──────┼───────────┼──────────┼──────┼────────┼────────┼──────┤ │ │ │ │ 117│ 7,518│ 1,282│ 273│ 7│ 9,197│ └──────┴─────┴──────┴───────────┴──────────┴──────┴────────┴────────┴──────┘

A bird partly crossing can be killed farther away, but a partridge coming dead on, in spite of the increase of impact caused by its speed, is far out for a cylinder and No. 6 shot at 30 yards, but with a choke bore and No. 5 shot it is well within range at 40 yards. Then a fast going-away driven bird is 10 yards nearer than it looks if you have No. 5 pellets in the gun, and a good deal farther off than it looks if you have No. 6.

So far only the actual bringing down of game has been considered, but there is the question of ethics too. With all shot there is some distance at which a body shot ceases to be effective, and when killing must depend on hitting a vital exposed part, or the wing. As the body is more than twice as big as these exposed vitals, namely the head and neck, it follows that the body will be hit twice as often as these vital parts. Beyond the distance at which body shots will kill, it follows that the shooter wounds twice for every head he bags. Consequently there is a wounding distance for each kind of shot pellet for straight going and coming game.

This wounding distance, for No. 6 shot, the author would be inclined to place at all ranges beyond 30 yards and up to 100 yards; for No. 5 shot, all distances beyond 40 yards and up to 120 yards. But as most people do not shoot at game beyond 50 yards, for practical purposes the wounding distance is from 30 to 50 yards with No. 6, and from 40 to 50 yards with No. 5 shot. Full-feathered partridges are the birds alluded to. August grouse can be killed farther away with much more certainty.

In all the public London trials of guns the patterns of cylinders have not averaged as high as 100 pellets of No. 6 in the 30 inch circle at 40 yards range. With 1¼ oz. of No. 6, of 270 pellets to the ounce, about 250 pellets in the same circle have been frequently obtained at the same 40 yards range from choke bores. But the majority of guns sold as cylinders now will put as many as 120 pellets in the circle, and the author has seen one of Holland’s put 160 pellets in that circle. In this gun there was no noticeable choke bore when a barrel gauge was used at all distances within 8 inches of the muzzle. The author did not attempt further to learn how this barrel was bored, and it would not be fair to expose it if he knew, which is not the case. But now that the principle of boring is well understood, there appear to be several methods by which a similar result would be possible. The barrels are known to stretch very considerably under the pressure of the powder-gas, and consequently any treatment of the barrels at the muzzles that would prevent them stretching with the rest of the barrel would act, more or less, like a modified choke. This might be done perhaps by an external thickening of the barrel, or by a hardening of the metal just at the right spot.

However, to prefer a cylinder that gives a high pattern to a modified choke bore that does the same, is only a fad. The former is difficult to obtain, and the latter is everywhere; and it is not the modified choke that so often is made to shoot untrue to centre, but the full choke.

The disadvantage of the choke-bore pattern is that it may plaster the game at distances nearer than the cylinder does. To compare the two patterns made at 20 yards, it is difficult to believe that the choke is almost as free from plastering as the cylinder. As a matter of fact there are several reasons for the well-known surprise that it does not often plaster feathered game.

The birds are not often coming straight at the gun nor going quite straight away from it, and any tendency to cross the line of aim is equivalent to allowing the game some benefit for any slight inaccuracy of timing the shot, and any wrong allowance in front. For instance, perhaps 5 inches too much allowance in front, with otherwise correct timing, at 20 yards, might very well allow half the shot column to go past a slow bird before he flew into the remainder of the shot column, which would be equivalent to shooting at a motionless bird with only half the pattern.

On the other hand, a very fast bird may fly right through the shot column before more than half of it has passed his line of flight. When the bird is caught by the centre of the head of the column at 20 yards range, he has but 10 inches to fly to get out of the line of flight of the shot from a full choke bore. The last pellets in the load will not be travelling more than 700 feet per second, and fast game is often going at 100 feet per second and more, although newly started game in still air may not often exceed 60 feet per second. But probably the real reason why good shots especially do not plaster their game at near distances is that they always shoot well in front, with a view to hitting only in the head and neck. At short range the slowest pellets are quite equal to killing whenever they hit straight for a vital part, exposed or otherwise. A shot aimed well forward with the intention of almost missing, by premature arrival of the pellets on the line of the bird’s flight, is almost sure to result in the cleanest kind of kill, brought about by two or three shot pellets in the head and neck and none anywhere else.

This also is often accomplished even at long distances, but not in the same way. Then the shot that succeeds must be well timed to get the bird’s body into the thickest of the pellets, and one of the reasons why the body is not plastered is that from most angles of impact, on a coming bird, the body shots glance off, and only the head, neck, and wing shots tell. The only great chance of smashing winged game that occurs is in near shots at going-away game, and then, whether a man holds a cylinder or a choke bore, he will assuredly give lots of “law,” even if, in doing so, the game passes out of sight.

There is an idea that the killing circle from a gun can be mapped out by geometric progression. That is to say, that if lines are drawn from the muzzle to the extremity of a 40 inch circle at 40 yards, you will be able to measure off, or calculate, the killing circle for straight-away game at any distance. That is not so. At the nearer distances the size of the killing circle is regulated by the pellets that, at 40 yards, are outside of it altogether. There they are too thinly scattered to count for chances. Thus the killing circle of a cylinder and of a full choke have no relationship to each other, or to geometric progression of the spread of pellets for each distance.

The author has measured many patterns at different distances, and he believes that the following table shows very truly the diameters of the killing circles covered, on the basis of that pattern which was regarded as thick enough to kill game in the cylinder days. That is to say, the latter sort of gun was tried at 40 yards where it spread fairly evenly over a 40 inch circle. But its proper distance was 30 yards, and at that range nothing else at any other distance gives the shooter an equal chance with No. 6 shot.

FOR STILL, OR STRAIGHT AWAY, OR STRAIGHT COMING GAME. THE SIZE OF THE KILLING CIRCLE BASED ON A MINIMUM 100 PELLETS IN A CIRCLE OF 30 INCH DIAMETER

┌────────────────────────┬────────┬────────┬────────┬────────┬────────┐ │ Description of gun and │ At 20 │ At 30 │ At 40 │ At 50 │ At 60 │ │ size of shot. │ yards. │ yards. │ yards. │ yards. │ yards. │ ├────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Cylinder and No. 6 shot.│22 in. A│35 in. A│40 in. B│ none │ ... │ ├────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Even spreading choke │20 in. A│26 in. A│30 in. B│37½ in. │45 in. C│ │ bore and No. 6 shot │ │ │ │ C │ │ ├────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Centre clustering choke │20 in. A│25 in. A│28 in. B│34 in. C│40 in. C│ │ bore and No. 6 shot │ │ │ │ │ │ ├────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Cylinder and No. 5 shot │21 in. A│34 in. A│ none │ ... │ │ ├────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Even spreading choke │19 in. A│25 in. A│30 in. A│37½ in. │ none │ │ bore and No. 5 shot │ │ │ │ B │ │ ├────────────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Central clustering choke│19 in. A│24 in. A│27 in. A│35 in. B│ none │ │ bore and No. 5 shot │ │ │ │ │ │ └────────────────────────┴────────┴────────┴────────┴────────┴────────┘

In the above table each circle of shot has been marked with a reference letter, which is intended to imply—

A, that all pellets will have enough strength to kill if they only hit the body, and in direct line for a vital.

B, that only the fastest pellets in the load will have enough strength to kill by body shots, and that at least half the pellets will only have enough strength to kill if they hit head, neck, or wing.

C, that none of the pellets will kill by body wounds, but only the small number that chance to hit head, neck, or wing.