First permission

[Stabs 3]

Does this ring any bells with anyone?

 

Made me laugh reading it

 

I can still remember my first permission, which I am sure was given to me more in order to shut me up than for any serious dent I would put in the rabbit population. Having got friendly with a lad at school who came from a fairly wealthy family, it was with total joy that I noticed he had an old Webley .177 air rifle propped up in the corner of his bedroom. Now as my mate’s family had a few quid, they also had a bit of land surrounding their house, so we’d get out with this Webley and shoot empty Kestrel cans (don’t know where they came from!) around his property. Not content with simply shooting beer cans, we started to venture further a field, mainly into the apple orchards surrounding his house, in an attempt to bag us a rabbit. There are times when I look back and think how funny it would have been to have a video of yourself out hunting back then. We must have made more noise than a charging Rhino and it’s no wonder that we never shot anything, despite the rabbits being literally on our doorstep. Our field craft was non-existent and we quite rightly didn’t deserve to kill anything. Actually it’s a bloody good we didn’t hit anything as that Webley wasn’t powerful enough the break the skin on a rice pudding and if we had shot something, we’d have only injured it and caused unnecessary pain.

 

 

Well this farce went on for a while and then I decided that I needed my own rifle and that I was going to do anything to get one. My parents agreed so long as I joined a club (yeah, right!) and behaved responsibly with it. What I did was join the BASC straight away and scoured the papers, air gun mags and gun shops for a decent weapon. Eventually finding an old Airsporter .22 for sale in a newsagent’s window, I persuaded my Dad to take me round the blokes house who was selling it, as I was still too young to buy one myself. This bloke took me into the garden with the rifle and he loosed off a few shots and then handed it to me. The first thing I noticed was the weight compared to the Webley, this thing weighed a ton to me! It had open sights and had clearly been well looked after. He could have handed me a right dog of a rifle and I’d have still given him my £60, but as it turned out, I ended up buying a nice piece. Wrapped in a bin bag, the rifle went in the boot of the car and we headed of home. I was dying to phone my mate and let him know what I’d bought so as soon as I got home I called him and I was soon on my pushbike, bagged rifle across the handle bars, on my way over to do some real damage to rabbit population. Looking back, I think we spent the rest of the daylight hours playing around with the sights…so the bunnies were safe for another day!

 

 

One of my Mam’s mates had a bit of a large garden, consisting of a couple of acres of lawn, with brambles right at the back and I think my constant pleading, rather than my proficiency with a rifle gained me my first permission! After school, me and my mate headed off to this garden, armed to the teeth and dressed head to toe in camouflage. We only had one rifle between us, but we had God knows how many knives. As I sit here and write this, I am actually chuckling away remembering what we took with us. The list went something like this:

 

 

BSA Airsporter

 

Army Clasp Knife, Drop pointed lock knife

 

Tin of Eley wasp pellets

 

Mess tins, teabags, sugar, UHT milk, Corned Beef

 

Hexamine stove

 

1 Decoy Pigeon and scrim netting,

 

Bowie Knife and Binoculars

 

Why we took that stuff I’ll never know. I guess I will put that one down to youthful exuberance! Looking back we must have appeared ridiculous, but we believed those things were essentials! Oh well…

 

 

It was obvious as to where the rabbits were coming from and we set ourselves up about ten yards away and waited. I am amazed that any rabbits showed from their holes due to the close proximity of us two muppets, but show they did. Upon the emergence of the first half grown from the brambles, I was given a dig in the ribs by my mate and quickly focused on the job in hand. I set the sights on the bunny and pulled the trigger. Now I was always told to squeeze the trigger, but I definitely pulled it this time! The shot went off, the rabbit sat up and then decided that the brambles were the safer option after all. He needn’t have bothered like as we couldn’t have hit a cow’s arse with a banjo at that point. Cursing our bad luck, we decided to wait for another one and curiously enough, we didn’t have to wait long. The end result was the same as the first, total miss. By this point, I was cursing the crappy rifle I had bought and I handed it to my mate, whilst I stalked off to make a brew. As the water was boiling I heard another shot and to my total relief, my mate had missed too! Now that’s not a very charitable attitude I know, but if he had shot and killed a rabbit, then that would imply that my shooting was out, and we all knew that couldn’t be the case!

 

 

Both agreeing that the sights must be out, we thought we’d take pot shots at the decoy pigeon to while away the time before our parents came and picked us up. We stuck the plastic facsimile out in the middle of the garden and retreated about twenty yards. And do you know, we hit that bloody pigeon with every bloody shot! The excitement of having a live quarry in front of us earlier in the evening must have been too much and affected our aim considerably. Well this shooting game had just become far more complex than the point and shoot we at first considered it to be!

 

 

Next on the shopping list for me were telescopic sights. Having read all the magazines available to me, I went into town (with the rifle in a bin bag again) on a limited budget and bought a rifle bag and a Bushmaster scope. Now there was no stopping us!

 

 

Upon arrival at the garden the next time, the lady of the house told us about a great spot, which was an abandoned battery chicken farm which had been closed for a few years due to pressure from the animal rights people. It was only a short walk to this farm and when we arrived we found an earth work bank had been thrown up at the entrance in an attempt to keep travellers out. As we climbed over this, we say literally dozens of long, single story sheds stretched out in front of us and debris scattered everywhere. We entered an old hut and took the rifle out of the bag. As soon as we had stepped outside this hut, a partridge got up at our feet and we knew immediately that this was a good place!

[johnnyboy28 1]

Good read so far mate

carry on then

[Guest little_lloyd]

Stabs mate dont stop there ,, Cracking write up

[Coney 3]

Keep it coming Stabs best thing I've read for a while.

[m.hubbard 1]

spanktastic mate wicked read.m

[SEAN3513 7]

nice..............its like....... your there !!!!!!

Edited May 31, 2008 by SEAN3513

[roybo 2,873]

god that brings back the memories exept it was a bsa meteor,in my case.

over the canal shooting bottles in the water,then the odd rat ,until we got bored with missing then

turned the guns on each other cracking read stabs

[Stabs 3]

 

The sheds were shin deep in bird muck and mud and we didn’t really fancy going in there to be honest with you. Shunning the sheds, we made the short walk to a taller building that housed a silo for the grain. The entire front of this building was one large door that was jammed open and judging by the build up of dirt around the bottom, hadn’t been moved for some time. I think the previous occupants of this farm had left in a hurry as evidenced by the office furniture and documents lying strewn across the place. I don’t know what came over us at this point, but finding a hut with documents and books around the place set off some sort of chemical reaction in our heads and all of us started going through the drawers, looking for god knows what. I mean there was hardly likely to be the farms payroll in there but a scavenger outlook descended upon us and we didn’t give up until we were satisfied there was nothing salvageable there. Finally we remembered what we were there for and we discovered that as well as leaving lots of old rubbish behind, the farm owners also left a lot of grain behind. With the door of this silo shed being open, the feral pigeons were free to come and go as they pleased and our faces lit up as we saw about half a dozen of them sitting on the inside frame of the building. Without a word being said, our rifles barrels were all pointed skyward and we started shooting! It was as if we all wanted to be the first to kill a bird as some of the actual shot placement was woeful! We were in such a hurry to get our pellets away and stop those birds from getting out of the open door that we were again guilty of panicking! I don’t remember the final tally but I can tell you we were buoyed up with our success and what in effect was poor shooting was instant repackaged as the stuff of legends! The fact that we now had physical evidence for our amazing shooting and hunting skills served to encourage us no end.

 

 

It was with a real spring in our steps that we moved on down the rows of huts looking for more game to shoot. A dirt track led to a huge brick barn and upon rounding this we came upon the rows of long, low barns that used to house the chickens. As we turned the corner we saw a handful of rabbits race away at right angles to us, going from our right away to our left. Thinking back, the rabbits were about forty yards away from us and running fast. I never even thought about distance and firing at a moving object, but I just put that Airsporter to my shoulder and pulled the trigger. A wriggling rabbit was what I saw when I lowered the rifle and I couldn’t actually believe I’d hit the bunny! My friends were as amazed as I was and despite it being a total 100% fluke, I found I was actually taking credit for the shot! Words were coming out of my mouth that I seemingly had no control over and I was making claims that I knew to be untrue, but hey, that was some shot and I was too busy basking in adulation to worry about the fact that I couldn’t have made that shot again if I tried.

 

 

Now that we had a real live (dead) rabbit, it was time to actually put into practice all of the things we’d read about in the magazines and books available. We certainly didn’t have a shortage of knives with us but we did have a shortage of experience. I think we strung that rabbit up by its neck with a football boot lace and I got to work on removing its guts. After an absolute age we all had stinking fingers (steady!) as we’d all had a crack at this poor bunny. As guttings go, it was an aberration, but the first in a long line and we all had to start somewhere.

 

 

The rows between these huts were overgrown and the weeds were waist high, affording ample cover for the bunnies to graze. Because we couldn’t see them, we devised an ingenious (stupid!) idea of harvesting these rabbits. One of us would stay at the mouth of one of the rows whilst the rest of us would drive the bunnies out towards the waiting rifle. I cringe thinking about it now but so convinced were we of hitting moving targets that we didn’t see any wrong in this method. As soon as we started, the bunnies began moving but they weren’t necessarily going in the right direction! The ones that did were missed by our resident sniper and we naturally accused him of being a crap shot. Turns were taken which only served to prove that as well as being idiots, we were all crap shots! We soon ran out of rows and thankfully out of rabbits too. A few too many pellets had come too close to me when I was driving so I was happy to see the end of that little caper.

 

 

As we’d run out of game on top, we decided to put our stalking skills to the test….which actually meant we climbed to the top of an earth banking and lay there waiting for the rabbits to show beneath us. Not much skill involved in that you’d think and you’d be right but we still managed to stuff it up. Five minutes went past before the first fart rang out which was obviously met with great mirth. This was followed by shushes all round as we got back to the job at hand and concentrated hard on not moving. Five more minutes went by and the silence was broken by the sound of a match striking against the side of a Swan Vesta packet and instead of us thinking “oh no†we all simultaneously thought “what a good idea†as we all fumbled around for packets of Embassy Number 1s and Zippos. I am actually sitting here shaking my head and laughing as I type this as we were such clowns. What we should have done was just get up and go home but we sat there smoking away for another hour or two with nothing to show for it.

 

 

We walked away from that farm with one rabbit between us but we felt on top of the world! Here was proof that we knew what we were doing. We were to revisit that farm on many occasions and we actually saw a peacock there once and despite us chasing it, we never got it. I can imagine trying to explain that one to my mam….â€but I shot it over the farm! Honest I did mam!†She’d have had me down the nearest country house apologising for shooting one of their ornamental birds as the groundsman scratched his head because there wasn’t any missing!

 

 

As we waited to get picked up by one of the dads, we all stood around with our cammo on and our gun bags and we thought we were the dog danglies. I remember one of our number actually saying that he thought the locals in the village might think we were IRA members, which we gave serious thought to at the time. Now if the IRA actually employed children to walk around small Kentish villages carrying air rifles then I’m sure there would have been grounds for concern. As it was, we looked exactly like what we were – spotty little herberts with bad haircuts dressed up as undersized action men. Actually I do remember a time when one of our crew invited a mate to come out shooting one day and he did turn up in an IRA style balaclava! We noticed he was really upset once we’d stopped rolling around the floor in hysterics!

 

 

This was just one of many examples of how we showed ourselves to be complete fools in pursuit of game. I could go on and tell you of the nights when we’d race home from school and meet up and go hunting with nothing but knives. We’d jump fences on the local farms and we actually used to run after rabbits throwing knives at them! One of my mates (name withheld cos he’s massive!) brought his ninja throwing star with him for some reason but I suppose he had as much chance of getting a rabbit as we did! Have you ever seen a fat 14 year old running through a quite country field shouting his war cry and throwing ninja stars at fleeing rabbits? It’s an enduring image……..

 

 

Then there was the time we tried throwing fishing nets over bramble patches in the hope that a rabbit was in there…..

[FJager 0]

 

The shot went off, the rabbit sat up and then decided that the brambles were the safer option after all. He needn’t have bothered like as we couldn’t have hit a cow’s arse with a banjo at that point.

 

 

Nothing much has changed then mate.

 

Good read all the same.

[Stabs 3]

I've told you....there's something wrong with the sights on all of your rifles