Ballistic Buddies Adventures

Thanks to Kyle Johnson for sharing the great photo above via Unsplash

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Dictionary result for ballistic
/bəˈlistik/  or  bal·lis·tic

1) relating to projectiles or their flight.
2) moving under the force of gravity only.

So yea, once the trigger is pulled and a gun goes BANG, everything that happens afterwards is simple ballistics. . . .

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I had switched to stealth mode and was crouching below a large-leafed plant, staying as much in the shadows as possible. My gun was ready and so was I for my very – first – hunt. The field was quiet, but I knew that could change in a heartbeat as I scanned for my prey. No joy for several seconds, then, ah – there he is.

It was much too long of a shot from my position, so I carefully slipped out and followed the rim of a tall hedge of brush, staying low and out of sight, around an abandoned utility pole, across a short open area to a dilapidated structure which offered some cover, but no shade. I carefully and slowly moved along an old concrete path and eased myself over a short vine-covered wall down into the shadow of a large tree. Staying low, I moved to the edge of the shadow, then around a smaller copse of tall shrubbery. Hmm; still too far away.

I finally realized that the only decent shot I had was out in the open. My prey seemed unaware of me so far, but he wouldn’t stay still for much longer.

I crawled out into the open, moving slow and staying low I settled into position and took aim. Looking down my rifle barrel, I saw there was a long obstruction between me and the prey, but as I watched, he turned in a way that exposed his full chest and, ah! This is my best shot. It won’t get any better. My heart pounded as I tried to stabilize my aim – then found the trigger.

“Young man! I need you to lower your gun and remove your finger from the trigger.” Jerked from my adventure and back to reality, I turned my head to see a police officer holding out his hand. Clearly, he also wanted my gun, so I handed it over. He looked at it and smiled. “Ah, I’ve seen this model. It’s a nice BB gun.” He stood up and stepped over to the grassy front yard I’d just crawled across and discharged the chambered BB into the ground with a loud CRACK. He then came back and sat on the curb near where I was still laying on my back below my prey, a small blackbird who was still sitting high above us.

“Let’s talk some about what you were just doing. As I saw it, you were aiming straight up at a target, on a power line, in the middle of a neighborhood. So, tell me, in the small chance that you shot at – but missed that bird, where would that BB have landed?’

It was a startling question and I thought it had to be a trick one because it would certainly come right back down.  Because I couldn’t immediately see the trick answer, I chose what I now know to be the worse answer possible, “I don’t know sir.”

The officer smiled, unwilling to let me off that easy, he stood up and offered me his hand so we could stand together. He even stepped off the curb to get his eyes and mine closer to level. “And that is the first reason you should not take that shot. Never pull the trigger unless you know for sure every possible thing your bullet could hit. Since you didn’t know, there was no safe way to take the shot. Let’s figure this out together. You were aiming straight up. Where would it have to have gone – if you missed?”

He had me and I was beginning to think that he’s making a good effort at not making me feel like a fool, but this conversation was fast closing down to just that conclusion. “Um, straight back down.”

“I agree. So, we’ve resolved the first problem. But that is only the first. The second is look around you. Take note of anything your BB might hit when it comes back down. Do you see anything that you don’t want to accidentally break or kill?”

I did. I saw his point immediately and was embarrassed for being so stupid. There were houses and parked cars – all normal neighborhood stuff and a few kids out of school for the afternoon just like me playing around in the mid-afternoon sun.  Someone’s dog was sniffing around the lawn next door and across the street, my friend’s dad was coming out his garage door to mow his lawn. I swallowed as I realized that I was this close to being arrested for being an idiot. “Yea – I can see that you understand now. The second reason you should not have taken that shot is, no one wants to be responsible for what you might have broken or killed if you missed that bird. That could have turned out very bad.

“Here’s what I want you to do.  Take your gun and set up an area somewhere safe, where your target has some kind of wall or hillside behind it.  So, you aim at an empty can and hit it, the can bounces away, but if you miss it, you only hit that wall.  And never – ever try to shoot straight up because your bullet, if you miss, can only come straight down, right back at you and you stand no chance of seeing it to dodge it. In this case, gravity is not your friend,” and he handed my gun back to me, smiled and said good-bye.

I watched as he walked across the street to where he had parked his police car, got in and drove away, leaving me feel like I had just dodged two bullets. What was I thinking? I felt like my seven years of accumulated maturity had just been knocked down to something below kindergarten. Ugh.

I glanced back up at the blackbird and he was still there. What? Are you mocking me? I was suddenly anxious to get off of the street. I already had one witness to my stupidity, but he was obsessed with how his lawn looked so maybe he didn’t notice – yea that’s so likely.  Feeling humiliated, I concluded that I had to let the bird live and go put my BB gun away for a while. The bird tilted his head away from me, pooped – barely missing my shoulder and flew off. Jerk! I thought. Maybe another day.

But I processed what had just happened and thanks to that officer, to this day, gravity and guns and basic ballistics and I have a much better understanding of each other, and I made it to my 8th birthday without a police record. I also decided to defend my parents sanity by not bothering them with what just happened.

It was only a few weeks later that I began a hunter safety course with dad so I could get a license to hunt with him and while this was going on, my great friend Bill Lee and I staked out our whole backyard with a bench against a wall where we put cans and tall hard plastic monsters to shoot at. We spent uncounted hours moshing in parts of those monsters from across the backyard with our BB guns.

Dad only shook his head when he found our nice backyard redwood bench peppered with hundreds of BB holes.

About that same time a friend and neighbor just a few doors up our street got a new bow and arrow set.

I was on his front lawn when he brought it out for several of us to see. We passed the bow and some of the nice sharp tipped arrows around for examination. We made all the remarks, smart and some not-so. When, he had the bow again he showed us how to notch an arrow for shooting, then suddenly, before we could say anything he aimed straight up and let fly.

We all shouted our disapproval and got ready to scramble.  Like the rest of them I now knew that we were in the target zone. The arrow flew out of sight. We lost it because the darn thing was painted white against a bright sunny sky, and it flew really high and fast. None of us knew where to hide, so few of us had actually moved when the arrow reappeared and fully self-destructed against the concrete sidewalk. We all exhaled a large gasp of relief and turned on him for nearly killing one of us. I was not as enthusiastic about giving him grief because my hypocrisy spider-sense wouldn’t let me. But he was strongly encouraged to never do that again. Then we swarmed the arrow’s landing zone to enjoy the destruction, “Man, look at the arrowhead! It looks more like a mushroom now.”

It seemed like only a few years later, with shotguns in hand, my neighbor, Bert (absolutely NOT his real name) and I set out to walk from our homes, through several neighborhoods and out into the hills south of Petaluma to do some serious bird hunting. We were hoping for pheasant.

Much of the time between my own aborted shot into the sky and finding myself on a hillside with my neighbor, and Pam – my dog and my 16-gauge shotgun had been spent mentally imaging what happened when I pulled the trigger of any gun. My original BB gun shot only one BB at a time but the shotgun, depending on the shell used might have hundreds of small pellets, exploding out in a small tight pattern which expanded greatly over distance. Something up close would be chewed to pieces while much further out would be peppered widely by lots of pellets.

What is not shown in the diagram is that the “shot” (that cluster of BBs) comes out of the end of the barrel at a tremendous speed, power and temperature, but immediately starts spreading, cooling and slowing down against the air and falling back to Earth like anything else would.

The full spread pattern actually looks more like this.

If you’re lucky enough to hit your bird too close – you only explode it into cooked feathers and muck.  If your bird is too far away but gets caught in the pattern, you’re lucky if you annoy it. Somewhere in-between is the sweet spot of killing a bird but leaving it intact enough to cook and serve for dinner.

So, mighty hunters that we were, we walked up a hill and came to a cluster of brush we hoped would contain a bird or two. The hillside sloped down on both sides of the cluster to become a ridge, so when we decided that Bert would go left and I would go right, we actually stayed fairly level while the area between us kept getting higher as the ridge got steeper and higher.

We’d walked quietly for about 10 minutes when I heard the brush rustle followed by Bert’s gun discharging and the geometric image of what was wrong immediately filled my mind.  He had to have raised his aim to target a bird from that brush and the bird would likely head up and away from him.  He most likely walked the same distance as I had so this almost certainly meant that he was straight across from Pam and I, below both the brush and ridge we were straddling. Given the range of shotgun bird shot, Pam and I were, oh no, right in the downside of his shot pattern that would go over the brush and then fall to where Pam and I were walking.

It’s actually frustrating at times like this, how your brain can be so much faster than your body. I fully understood what was about to happen while the sound of his shot was still in my ears, and even with the fact that shotgun shot is slower than sound, it still left me no time to do anything except begin to look down to protect my eyes from the wave of shotgun shot racing toward us.

I also realized that if the shot had slowed enough to fall, it would be going slow enough to not injure us – or at least not injure us very much. Well, we both felt each impact, but nothing broke through my jeans or jacket. My face and Pam’s whole uncovered body took hits, but as expected (okay – more “hoped”, than “expected”) none of the hits drew blood.

A quick glance at Pam told me that she was confused (Hey! Did you do that?) as she looked back at me suspiciously.  So – she was fine, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to yell back, “Damn it Bert! You just shot both Pam and me!” We then waited for him to panic, run back down the ridge, around and back up to make sure he hadn’t killed us. He arrived out of breath and frightened that he might have actually injured us until I finally grinned at him to make sure he knew all was well.

So, Bert got his own lesson about gun ballistics by making the same mistake I made so many years ago. Actually, since I didn’t see the problem until after it happened – I sorta own part of making the same mistake again – except this time I was the jerk blackbird. Nuts.

Oh, and once again, I took good care of my parents by not upsetting them with any hint of what just happened. What parent wants to hear how their kid was shot? It was just what any loving son would do.

I have no memory of what we did next, but we most likely continued our hunt after talking about how lucky both of us had been. I think I recall quipping how I doubted the taxidermist would have taken the job to make me into a wall-mounted trophy and I was pleased to walk away with nothing more than a great story of how much fun we used to be able to have in the hills of Petaluma back in the good old days of the early and mid, 1960s.

Oh, and Bert grew up to be a great bird-lover. How classic is that? that?

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