dead eye

I learned to handle rifles yesterday.

My mentor has been puzzling on how to teach me due to the issues of my cross eye-hand dominance...I favor the right hand, but am left-eyed. This hasn't posed too much of a problem with hand guns, or even shotguns, since you sight down the barrel, and with my ambidexterity it's no problem for me to shoot left-handed. But he was concerned about the cartridge ejection on rifles -- most of them eject the cartridge to the right, which he worried would fly right across my line of vision and cause trouble.

My biggest complaint with rifles is that I have a hard time with the scopes. I had similar issues with microscopes in high school biology -- my eyes just hate to focus through scopes; I usually wind up seeing a big ring of black, and by the time I finally manage to get a clear focus I've given myself an enormous headache. So Boss-Man's solution was extremely simple: iron sights (or "peep sights"). No scope, no cross hairs; just the basic rig of a sighting ring, through which you look to center the sights on the muzzle.

Voila. He started me out with a .30-30, nice and light, long range, low recoil, overhead ejection. I didn't do too badly for my first try -- everything was in the black on the target, though not as close to the red as I would have liked. Still, not bad, and not hard to shoot. The iron sights were working just dandy.

But then he handed me a .45-70. (This was Teddy Roosevelt's favorite big game gun.) It ejects to the right, but he wanted me to try it, just to see.

Well, the recoil rocked me back a step, and my shoulder told me that it had just been hit hard by something heavy. I said, "Ow." Boss-Man asked if I wanted to stop. I said, "No. I think this one's more accurate." I shot the remaining three rounds in the magazine. We walked over to the target to see how I'd done.

The .45-70s had gone right through the red.

I started laughing. He rubbed his face. "You amaze me," he said. "Did you know that the cavalry in the Old West hated this gun because they didn't like the recoil?"

"So...I'm kicking the cavalry's ass?" I said.

He laughed. "I give you a .30-30. You shoot it a few times and say, 'Naw...give me a REAL gun.' Unbelievable."

I shot about sixteen more rounds. Dead on every time. No problem with the cartridge ejecting to the right; when I'm focused on something, I'm not easily distracted. Somewhere in the process, because I kept saying, "Ow," Boss-Man checked the bottom of the cartridge box to see what kind of rounds I was shooting.

"OHH," he said. "That's why they're talking to you."

They were special cartridges that he'd amped up. About twice the power of the normal government rounds.

"Oh," I said. "So I'm not being a wimpy girl. A guy shooting this thinks the same thing, but I can SAY it because I'm a girl."

"Yes," he said.

"Cool." I took the proffered cartridges and loaded the rifle.

I'm my father's daughter.

I'll never have a boyfriend.