Peer Pressure
Yes, it was peer pressure.My father instigated it too. I am susceptible to peer pressure and today I caved. We had been hunting for the morning, only seeing a few birds with one in the bag thanks to a shot by me. By now, we’re all kind of tired and dragging, thanks to heavy duty hunting this weekend.
So we’re cruising home. We have a rule instituted during pheasant season as we have always said, we’re not allowed to go out in the country without a gun. The chance that we’d stumble across a dumb bird rises exponentially without a weapon in the vehicle.
My pops had just unloaded his gun in the back of Jarbear’s vehicle. I had not because I know. I turned to him and said “What are you doing? You’re going to guarantee us seeing a rooster on the way in to town.” His response was something that tore us all up anyways.
We’re about a mile from town and I had just said “We’ll probably see a cock up in the hedge row by the house.” We no more got by the hedge row and dad shouts “There’s a cock right there! It was moving up towards the fence.” Jarbear pulls up about 200 yards to the field entrance. He turns around and my father pressures me.
“Shoot it out the window.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yes.”
So I roll the window down, stick my gun out and get ready. Jarbear never even made it to a complete stop and I fired once. As soon as I shot, four more roosters took off from right there, birds we hadn’t seen. I try to jump out and grab the now dead rooster, but the automatic door locks have engaged. I’m juggling gun and door handle while telling Jar to unlock the damn door. My dad is grabbing the gun, when the door clicks open. I jump out grab the bird, jump back in and we’re off.
We get back into town and Dad offers up his judgment on the process of the SHP or Stop, Hop and Pop.
“That might be a new record. That only took about 10 seconds and a good time is about 20 seconds. However if Jarbear would have gotten the door open quicker, that could have shaved about 2-3 seconds off the time. I just thought if you were going to clean one, you might as well clean two.” (Kind of ironic because I clean everything. One time, after coming back from hunting two hours away, he asked me if I had shot anything. I said yes, I shot my limit. “Great! You can clean the one I shot that’s out in the garage.”)
And for those of you who might be thinking this is totally and completely unethical, we knew the people that lived there, so it was all good.
For the weekend, I shot 9 roosters, seven of them coming on Opening Day. I’m tired.
posted by Rusty @ 8:56 PM
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