Welcome to Shotgun Life

Learning to shoot and hunt at the age of 41 was such a revelation to me that I find myself constantly offering to help other women get into the shooting sports. Often, all it takes is the mere mention that I hunt to pique other women’s interest. Over and over, I’ve watched their eyes light up as the mental calculation leads them to the obvious: “If she can do it, I can do it too.”

For two months now, I’ve been slogging through the long, dark tunnel that is Not Duck Season. I feel actual anguish at having been ripped away from my marsh. The cast of winged characters – game and non-game – that made me laugh, curse and shout for joy has been replaced with the relentless torment of humans who exasperate and aggravate me.

The end of duck season always comes like a hard slap in the face. You can see it coming, almost in slow motion, but you’re still taken aback by its abrupt, stinging finality.

So when you get an unexpected shot at a post-season hunt – not just any post-season hunt, but one of epic potential – it feels like a dream.

I remember so vividly the day I went to buy my first shotgun.

My boyfriend Hank and I drove a couple miles down the main drag of our dilapidated 1960s-era suburb to our local hook-n-bullet store, an utterly charmless building with windows boarded over and painted, and not so much as a sprig of greenery anywhere in the parking lot. It was ugly even compared with already-low neighborhood standards.

It felt like we were the stars in a Quentin Tarantino movie: Well-dressed tourists moved out of our way as we strode down the sidewalk of Sutter Creek, the glittering mid-afternoon December sunshine in our face.

One more duck.

That’s what I told myself Sunday afternoon as I crept through a patch of nut grass in the marsh, bent low over the water to minimize my outline, straining to keep an eye on the birds without them seeing me.

Maybe I should’ve taken that shot.

As the morning chill dissipated, the sky brightened and even distant duck sightings grew more infrequent, it was becoming clear that Charlie and I were about to be skunked. On opening day, no less.

Skeet is not a game to me.

I don’t keep score. I ignore many of the rules and conventions. And I like to blaze through a round fast. Really fast. All I’m doing is trying to stay sharp for wingshooting. I don’t particularly want to be an expert at shooting inanimate clay disks.

Wanna know what I’m doing right now? Chances are I’m sitting at my computer going absolutely crazy because work is getting in the way of my dove hunting. Good Lord, we get only 15 days of good dove hunting here in California, and the opener this year is on the worst possible day for me. A Thursday. Not just a work day, but a really demanding, frenetic day. And I guarantee you there are mourning doves cooing on the roof over my head.

I am not a gun nut.

I don’t flip the pages of high-end gun magazines, staring at beautiful guns and sighing wistfully. I don’t need a different gun for every type of hunting I do. And about the only engraving I need on a gun is a serial number.