I recently spoke at a big wildlife banquet and all-day sporting event at a big church in Vicksburg, and what impressed me was the Awards Presentation after supper.  

They gave prizes to all those who had excelled in the arts of shooting, everything from skeet shooting to bow ’n’ arrow shooting. Marksmanship was the order of the day, and it is also Biblical, all the way from Little David strapping on Goliath, to those southpaw marksmen of the tribe of Benjamin.  

They finished up by calling up the competitors for the Youth Shoot: two of the top three were girls!

Girl shooting is also a tradition out here at Brownspur, and our ladies are all renowned sharpshooters. Betsy not only has been recognized nationally as an outstanding lady marksman with a pistol (9 mm), but she has the only perfect score I know of on bucks: she’s never missed one, and she’s never had to shoot one twice. One-Shot Betsy, we call her!

Christie, our oldest daughter, was at one time the best pistol shot in the family, dead-on with a .38 revolver, which came in handy for family peace of mind when she graduated from Tulane in Noo Awleans and departed forthwith for a career in publishing in Noo Yawk City.  

I ain’t saying that she toted whilst roaming the streets of the Big Apple, but on the other hand, she never got threatened, that her daddy knows of!

B.C., our youngest, stands to inherit her Granddaddy Big Robert’s “White Rifle,” a beautiful bird’s-eye-maple-stocked sporterized Enfield 30/06 that she had completely mastered by the time she left for college.  

It’s a heavy gun that I have never been able to use myself. I shoot from the left shoulder, and Big Robert fired from the right side, so when he carved that stock, he fashioned it with a roll comb suitable for the cheek of a right-handed shooter. If I were to fire it southpaw, it would undoubtedly break my cheekbone.

Incidentally, I’ve been banned several times from shooting some of the newer heavier rifles that son Adam and cousin Mountain Willy enjoy collecting, because modern heavy-impact rifles are often engineered with a “cast-off” design that absorbs some of the considerable recoil, but these are invariably designed for right-handed shooters. According to these two experts, left-handed shooters could actually suffer broken necks from this type heavy weaponry.

At any rate, I applauded right along with the other men when those two girls stepped forward to claim their marksmanship awards at Immanual Baptist the other night, and I was near’bout as proud of them as their daddy was – they were sisters, if I heard correctly, and the guy they sat down next to had to get a bigger sized camo cap, looked like to me.

When I was growing up, my mother wasn’t interested in shooting with her menfolks, but Aunt Rose used to whang away at those pesky squirrels in her pecan orchard on a regular basis.  

Matter of fact, the spring after we moved our home eleven miles from town and placed it across the pasture from Daddy and Mother’s house, and across the road from Uncle Sam and Aunt Rose’s house, nine-year-old Adam came running downstairs one morning to exclaim, “Daddy! Someone just shot out my window, right over my head!”

I went upstairs, and sho’nuff, the bullet had gone through a window pane about a foot over where the boy had been lying.

I strolled across the pecan orchard to see my elderly Aunt drinking coffee at her breakfast room table, with the windows wide open. Her little Winchester Model 73 .22 rifle was leaning against a chair.  “Aunt Rose, did you just shoot?”

“Yeah, those squirrels will get all my pecans, if I don’t kill them first.”

“Aunt Rose, you just shot out a window right over Adam’s head!” I accused.

She glared briefly out the window, and then observed huffily, “Well, I’m sorry! But last year, there wasn’t even a house over there!”

Lady shooters: they run in our family, too. Keep it up, Girls; good shootin’!