Emotional hunter

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Like Dick Cheney, veteran hunter John Freck knows the feeling of raising a shotgun to a covey of quail. ‘‘You get a huge adrenaline rush when the birds flush,’’ says Freck, who regularly pursues quail with his German shorthaired pointer, Gunnar. That rush is one of the reasons hunters love the sport. But it’s also the cause of accidents.

No matter what else they may think of Cheney, hunters around the country agreed last week that the vice president, known as a careful sportsman and a good shot, broke a cardinal rule: in that exhilarating moment when the birds scattered up all around him, he didn’t check to make sure his line of fire was clear before he pulled the trigger. ‘‘He lost control of his emotions,’’ Freck says.

For hunters, the important questions weren’t about how the US vice-president handled himself after the accidental shooting of hunt mate Harry Whittington, but about the mistakes he may have made leading up to it. Hunting quail isn’t like tracking large game, where there is one target shot with a single bullet from a rifle. Flushing a covey of quail can send a dozen or more birds flying in all directions, tempting a hunter to shoot outside his safe range. And bird hunting is usually done with shotguns, which spread hundreds of pellets of birdshot in a pattern wider than the barrel of the gun—increasing the chance that someone could be unintentionally hit if the shooter, concentrating on his quarry, swings too wide when he takes aim.

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Cheney’s political enemies dismissed his apology on Fox News as too little, too late. But hunters were relieved to hear the vice-president say that the accident was his fault. If Cheney’s mea culpa put the question of blame to rest, something else he said raised a different kind of ire among experienced hunters. He admitted that he’d had a beer at lunch on the day of the hunt—a huge taboo in the sport.

No one has alleged Cheney was impaired by alcohol; the hunt took place hours after the lunch, and the accident report says no alcohol was involved. But most hunters follow an iron rule of no drinking at all on the day of a hunt. ‘‘If you have a beer at lunch the hunt is over,’’ says preserve manager Lyons, who enforces a ‘‘daylight to dinnertime’’ alcohol ban on his property. ‘‘We drink all we want after the hunt.’’

For all their complaints about Cheney, though, sportsmen still had a little birdshot left over for the backsides of nonhunting journalists, some of whom chastised Cheney while getting the basic guns-and-ammo facts of the story wrong. ‘‘What really infuriates people is they come out and say that someone was shot with buckshot as opposed to birdshot,’’ says Todd Smith, editor-in- chief of Outdoor Life magazine. And hunters were driven crazy by the notion the birdshot could not possibly have wounded Whittington from 30 yards. Of course, none of those doubters volunteered to put that theory to a field test.

If any good comes from all this, it may be that Cheney’s misadventure will serve as a lesson to other hunters. It will be ‘‘used as part of the teaching of hunting and gun-safety courses for new hunters all across the country,’’ says Todd Sieben, a hunter and Republican state senator in Illinois. In New York, several Republicans are trying to name a proposed hunting regulation after him. ‘‘Cheney’s law’’ would make it a crime to leave the scene of a hunting accident—something Cheney didn’t do.

(Newsweek)