starbits
04-19-2015, 05:13 AM
I was 13 and although I had shot 22lr on a youth shooting team for several years and terrorized small critters with sling shots and bb guns this was a real hunt with a shotgun and everything. I was surprised and thrilled to be allowed to go along. This was in of all places Taegu, South Korea. The date was 22 November 1964, the one year anniversary of JFK's assassination. A Korean friend of my Dad's had asked my Dad and another man if they wanted to go pheasant hunting. The four of us climbed into a military jeep and set off to walk some fields several miles from the compound we lived on. When we got to the the fields I was shown how the safety worked and told to fire a shot. The first time I had fired a shotgun. Fifty years has a way of removing many details and I remember nothing of the shotgun itself. We had little luck finding pheasants and had driven to a couple different areas. In the afternoon I was walking down a gentle slope toward a dry wash which had a steeper wooded (brush and small trees) slope on the other side. Suddenly a cock pheasant flushed off the top of the wooded slope straight toward me, a classic station 8 skeet shot. I threw the shotgun up and pulled the trigger on a shotgun for only the second time in my life. Fifty years later I know that 13 year old kid had no clue what he was doing and the fact that that pheasant folded up and dropped like a rock had to have been a miracle. I still remember the disbelief in my Dad's voice "What do you mean you got one?" It was the only pheasant taken that day. Memories of a perfect day long ago. In the fifty years since I have never gone pheasant hunting again.
Starbits
Starbits