Look! Up In The Sky!
We had busted the turkeys off their roost before daylight. Then we hunkered down and got concealed as best we were able and tried to stay quiet. As dawn broke my partner Jim Mork began to call, doing the "ke ke run" trying to lure the lost birds back. After a while I figured it wasn't working and mentally relaxed. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was a turkey standing in the clearing in front of me! My heart leaped, my pulse started racing, and I grabbed my pistol which I had laid down. As I put the sights on the bird I noticed the gun was shaking all over the place. I hadn't been this excited since I killed my first deer many years before!
I tried to aim at the bird and jerked the trigger. And missed. At 30 feet. I cocked the hammer and let fly again almost in panic. And missed again of course. At that shot the hen took off and flew up over me heading for the trees behind me. Instinctively I swung the single action and fired. At the shot the bird's wings stiffened and with them outspread it sailed into the hillside and crashed, dead. I was shaking all over... my first turkey!
Thinking back (the above happened back in the mid-80's) I can still remember the rush. I am not excusing the poor shooting, but heck, anyone who has shot with me has seen me miss more than once. I remember being grateful that I had practiced aerial shooting for all those years! If I had not we would not have had wild turkey for Thanksgiving that year.
Dad got me started shooting stuff out of the air. When I was a teenager he was developing a line of bullet molds and bullets. As he worked on them he would load up 1000 rounds or so, hand them to me along with a pistol and say, "Go shoot these today and then bring me the gun. DON'T CLEAN IT!" - Which I was more than happy to do. Some weeks I fired 4,000 rounds or more. Being young I quickly grew bored of standing in one place and plinking rocks and cans. So I started tossing stuff in the air and shooting at it. I also practiced drawing and firing and point shooting along with slip-shooting (thumbing the hammer while holding the trigger back on a single action) and other stunts.
I found that it was not easy hitting stuff in the air so Dad started working with me. We loaded a bunch of ammo down to around 500 fps with light bullets, In the .357 I used a 110 gr. full-wadcutter. When fired into the air you could watch it go just about like a BB gun. With those loads I was able to tell whether I was shooting over the target (firing too late) or under (firing too early). I started out shooting 5 gallon paint can lids spun sideways, large side to me, up in the air. When those became easy to hit I used 1 gallon paint can lids. From those I graduated to smaller targets until 12 guage shotgun shells tossed up in the air were not too hard.
And I worked on using more powerful loads. Eventually the 12 guage shells were targets for my .22 Single Six. And I worked on using the .357 Magnum and .45 Colt SAA with full-power loads. While I never became "World-Class" in aerial shooting I got to where I could hold my own and not embarrass myself too often. It only took thousands of rounds of ammo. I am grateful to this day to my Dad who made it possible for a young kid to do that.
My aerial shooting was curtailed in the late 60's by the Southeast Asia War Games. When I go home in '69 I took it up again. While I was rusty the basics were there and I was able to get back to having fun. Sometimes I would haul peices of pine boards - 2X4's and 2X6's - out to the range. I would toss these with my gun hand, then jerk the .45 and blast away at them. Often, on bigger peieces of wood, I was able to get 2 or 3 shots into parts of board as it came apart in the air.
At the first Shootists Holiday in 1986 I tossed bowling pins up about 20 feet and then blew them apart with full power 300 gr. loads from my .45 Ruger. That was a lot of fun. It was practice like this that allowed me to get that first turkey, a young hen.
Nowdays we live in a part of the country where it is not safe to do aerial work with a handgun. Too many houses too close. You have to have open range country and areas where you know you ain't gonna drop a bullet on anyone. Full-house 357's and .45's will go a long ways..... Dad keeps his hand in at aerial shooting with a BB pistol. I have not. Yet every once in awhile the urge still hits me. I will be going to the Whittington Center this next year, the Lord willing. I plan on doing some aerial shooting....it has been too long.