Book Review

This time I’ll report on a new shooting manual, a history of British guns, a book of cartoons and a memoir—titles providing solid information, good fireside reading, lavish illustrations and plenty of laughs.

Good Shot

By Steven Mulak
(Stackpole Books, 800-732-3669, www.stackpolebooks.com; 2008)
132 pp. $19.95.

When you miss a grouse, pheasant or duck, do you know exactly why you didn’t connect? Do you make all of the easy shots afield—the “gimmes” that present themselves over the course of a season? If not, you’re probably like me: something less than a “good shot.” To become a good shot—or at least to make yourself a better, more proficient wingshooter—read this lucid, low-key approach to transferring skills learned on the skeet range to hunting situations.

Steven Mulak is a retired ship’s engineer and longtime bird hunter and clay-target shooter living in Massachusetts. He characterizes shotgunning as “an application of the laws of physics with a little athleticism thrown in”—a science rather than an art. He cites two basic tenets: “Find the line of flight of the target, and keep the gun moving.” He adds, “When you’re trying to hit a flying target with a shotgun, you’re not so much shooting at something as shooting where something is going to be a moment from now.”

Skeet was invented in the early 20th Century by a fraternity of grouse hunters who reasoned that a hunter cannot learn to shoot well just from hits and misses accumulated in the field. Instead, using skeet, the hunter can duplicate, for the sake of practicing, most of the shots encountered during a bird season. Writes Mulak, “Skeet offers a universal frame of reference for all shotgun shooters.” At each of the different stations, “the same target line is traced each time, and errors in interpretation can be identified and corrected.”

Mulak advocates a non-competitive approach. At each station, stand with the safety on, holding your favorite grouse or pheasant gun in a low-gun, forward-hand-extended position like you’d use when approaching a dog on point. Mulak describes how to break each target as it’s presented. If necessary, he suggests taking that target again and again until you’re making the shot consistently. Don’t get hung up on your score—or don’t even bother to keep score. And learn how not to “check,” or stop, your gun’s motion. Writes Mulak, “My own follow-through mantra is to mentally repeat the declarative ‘Hit the bird’ as I swing the gun. I pull the trigger on the word the and don’t stop the gun’s swing until I’ve gotten the word bird out.”

In a chapter on field shotguns Mulak reveals that he shoots a Beretta 12-gauge Ultralight, which offers interchangeable choke tubes and a weight of just more than six pounds—great for carrying from shot to shot. Although he used a 20-gauge for the first 35 years of his adult life, Mulak now wants a 12 because it throws a better pattern, upping his chances of hitting a bird hard and with enough pellets to make an instant kill. He suggests figuring out the “slot” in which most of your shots will be taken. (In his Massachusetts grouse coverts it’s between 17 and 27 yards for the first barrel, 23 and 33 yards for the second—distances that want a first-barrel choke of Skeet and a second-barrel choke of Improved Cylinder for the No. 8 loads he uses.) “Each situation has one right gun-load-choke combination. Find it, and consistency follows.”

The book offers advice on how to effectively see birds (don’t focus on the ground, as your eyes then will need a moment to adjust themselves to the greater light coming from above, following a bird’s upward flush). Mulak discusses prescription shooting glasses, the best ways to carry a gun, and how to plot an effective shooting quadrant when approaching a possible shot.

Some quibbles: The dust-jacket photo is a bit of a clunker. The book does not include a diagram of a skeet range, which beginners would find helpful. Mulak believes that a straight stock, as on an English side-by-side, forces the gunner to twist his or her wrist into “an unnaturally convoluted position” during carrying, leading to hyperextension and possible ligament damage. I’ve used straight-stock guns for more than 30 years and have never had such problems. But these are minor complaints. I got so much practical information from Good Shot that I know I’ll refer to it repeatedly in years to come.

The British Sporting Gun and Rifle

By Donald Dallas
(Quiller Press, distributed by Stackpole Books, 800-732-3669, www.stackpolebooks.com; 2008)
423 pp. $100.

This large-format, heavily illustrated book subtitled Pursuit of Perfection, 1850-1900 paints a detailed picture of what the author terms “the British gunmaker’s finest hour”—a half-century during which thousands of gunmakers were building inventive, often excellent and quickly evolving firearms for the economic juggernaut that was Victorian England. During that span shotguns and rifles evolved from muzzleloading percussion hammerguns with twist barrels to break-action, breechloading firearms with drilled steel barrels and numerous sophisticated features—essentially, the “best” guns of today.

Donald Dallas has written histories of the premier gunmakers Holland & Holland, Boss and Purdey. A history teacher specializing in 19th Century Britain, he uses original, primary sources when researching—which means that his books are much more than rehashes of previously published material. In The British Sporting Gun and Rifle he places technological developments within their contemporary social and economic settings, yielding insight into how and why the sporting gun was able to change “out of all recognition.”

Key to this evolution was the 1852 Patent Act, which considerably reduced patent fees and made the process of registering a patent much easier than it had been previously. Thus, writes Dallas, “very ordinary gunmakers felt they could contribute to the development of breech-loading and its offshoots.” Also many wealthy people in Britain wanted to shoot, with the royal family setting an example, and a burgeoning rail network made it possible for people to travel many miles to enjoy wingshooting.

The book includes more than 200 high-quality color photos (supplied mainly by various auction houses) depicting actual guns. There are 444 black & white images of patent diagrams, catalog copy, newspaper advertisements, makers’ labels, cartridges, tools, inventors and gunmakers, premises and factories, workers regulating guns on ranges, try-guns, manor houses, shooting parties, game carts, luncheon vans, and so on. Illustrations depict changing styles of hammer design, barrel construction, actions, opening systems, engraving, forends, triggers, gun cases—the list goes on and on.

Dallas gives us the stories behind many of the guns and their notable owners, such as James Sutherland Chisholm, Chief of the Clan Chisholm, who ordered nearly as many guns from John Dickson in Edinburgh as the eccentric Dickson client Charles Gordon (see “Charles Gordon & His Guns,” May/June ’08). Or the 4th Earl of Craven, who shot with a trio of James Woodward single-trigger sidelock ejectors until “he was accidentally drowned.” There’s a photo of a young Lord Walsingham, best known for his record bag of 1,070 grouse at Blubberhouse Moor on August 30, 1888. This cad’s appetite was voracious in other ways as well, with a present-day relative revealing that “his marital infidelities were remarkable in an age when infidelity was commonplace; though the scandal was for the most part confined to the locality since it seems he usually slept with his housemaids.”

Fourteen chapters cover various steps in gun evolution, such as “The Zenith of the Percussion Gun and Rifle,” “The Introduction of the Pinfire Breech-Loader,” “From Hammer to Hammerless” and “The Shooting Experience.” Among the eight appendices is a particularly fascinating series of articles originally published in the late 1880s entitled “Crack Gunmakers Introduced to our Foreign Readers,” which gives unique insights into the firms of Lancaster, Boss, Grant, Purdey, Rigby and Woodward.

This thorough and thoroughly beautiful book would be a treasure trove for anyone who owns a vintage British gun or who is fascinated by Britain’s golden age of gunmaking.

Hilarious Hunting Cartoons

By John Troy
(Skyhorse, 212-643-6816, www.skyhorsepublishing.com, www.stoegerbooks.com; 2008)
174 pp. $14.95.

As a longtime hunter, John Troy knows whereof he draws. Because hunters are often over-the-top enthusiasts, their antics provide plenty of raw material for a knowledgeable humorist. In a foreword to this color hardcover book Nick Lyons compares cartoonist Troy to the late prose writer Ed Zern as an expert in puncturing “the pretensions, the illusions, the passions of folk oblivious to the ironies of their actions.”

In a Troy cartoon a hunter watches his dog come running down out of a tree in hot pursuit of a squirrel and comments to his partner, “I think I’ll lighten up on Spot’s high-protein diet.” In another a hunter arrives, armed, at the Pearly Gates, beyond which deer frolic and pheasants flush, only to have Saint Peter inform him: “The good news is, Mr. Filmore, this is heaven. The bad news is, this is posted property.” Troy’s cartoons have been published in various outdoor magazines from Field & Stream to Audubon.

My Dogs and Guns

By John Graves
(Skyhorse, 212-643-6816, www.skyhorsepublishing.com, www.stoegerbooks.com; 2007)
96 pp. $19.95.

John Graves, now in his 80s, lives on a ranch in the cedar hills of North Texas. He’s a fine writer about country matters—one reader described him as “a Texas version of E.B. White.” Graves is probably best known for his Goodbye to a River, about a three-week canoe trip down the Brazos River before a series of dams changed that waterway. Another book, Hard Scrabble, describes his efforts to improve the land where he resides.

My Dogs and Guns joins two essays published 20 years apart in the magazine Texas Monthly. Graves’ dogs are imperfectly trained, plenty smart and prone to misadventures with raccoons, rattlesnakes and other varmints. His favorite was Blue, a crossbred Basque-Australian sheepdog who, writes Graves, “amounted to . . . a country Nice Dog, which in terms of utility is a notable cut above the same thing in the city.” The guns are a potpourri of rifles, shotguns and pistols, several of which have interesting links to Graves’ Texas forebears. A few of the firearms produced unexpected holes in the furniture and ceiling of Graves’ house. The essays in this brief book are wry in tone and make for a couple of hours of pleasant reading.