Escape from Planet 4 MOA– Part 2

The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.

In this case, General Mattis was right. I had over 20 years of goo to remove and replace.

Lies

I cannot say I ever came right out and lied to anyone about how well I shot. Compared to what I saw going on around me, I was not all that bad. I never shot a deer at 10 yards and claimed it was at 100 yards. Actually shooting a deer at 10 yards is nearly as much of a feat with a rifle as it is with a bow. Close is close. The lying came more from the inside. I told myself that I was prepared for whatever came my way. I told myself I was ready for season. I just knew I was going to have a steady aim when the time came. There was a part of me that knew that was wrong, but I also told myself that this was part of deer hunting. In my experience it was.

Ignorance

When I started shooting, I never paid much attention to how many grains. A bullet was a bullet. Cheap was cheap. As long as what was stamped on the box matched what was stamped on the barrel I was good to go.

When it came to scopes, I really had no clue. I knew you tried to match where the crosshairs were with where the bullet hit. That was what you got the guy to do at the store when you had it bore-sighted. After that? I was in the dark. In a lot of ways, the technology helped to enforce this ignorance. Once you have a vague idea where the rifle shoots in relation to the crosshairs, you can diddle with the adjustments until they line up. A properly bore-sighted rifle will put you on a deer well out to 50 yards. All that guff I read in magazines seemed like so much fluff for so many years. The way I figured it, if I need to shoot a deer at 25 yards, I should set my scope to zero at 25 yards. Right? I should practice at 25 yards. Right?

Fantasy

I walked around for about 25 years really believing, or at least telling myself that I believed. About 2004, I was coming out from an afternoon hunt on the farm when I saw a heard of doe way over on the side of the next ridge at least 400 yards away. I decided to experiment. I knew I was not going to hit anything. I just wanted to see what would happen. I braced my rifle on a large tree and let fly. I was aiming for the center of one large doe’s chest. I saw a round land in the hillside a good 7 feet below her hooves. After 4 rounds the herd decided I might be a threat and ran off. That was the first time Reality really met my dreams.

It was shortly after this that my first experiment with building a meatpole began to rot and I built a new one out of properly treated wood and used the remains of the old meatpole for a 100-yard target stand. Before then, I used milk jugs and cardboard boxes. Now I stapled paper targets to corrugated cardboard. All of a sudden I started to see how fantastic my assessment of my aim really was.

Self-Delusion

Over the years, a fellow builds up his own self-image. I never put much stock in my ability to shoot straight, so it was not like I had any real stake in it. I went past 2008 without ever really testing my skills out on a deer at any greater distance than 80 yards. It was about then that I got the idea for a luxury box blind between two long, thin pastures. The idea for Midway was born, but there was a problem. I could not shoot that far. Well, I could– just not very well.

This is when it all started to all come crashing in. I needed to up my game. Again, the technology kind of supports the self-delusion. If you are good enough to hit 50 yards, you can stretch it usually to 100 yards. If you can hit a pie plate at 100 yards, you can probably hit it at 150 yards. To the back treeline of Midway going either way was about 200 yards.

It was not until fairly late, I would say in the last decade or so, that I really set about improving my accuracy. I got serious about it. I started asking stupid questions. I started being honest with myself about what I was doing, and I stopped making ignorant assumptions. The rest of this series will focus on what I have done to improve my rifle accuracy, particularly concerning deer hunting.

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