With the feet and body in position, place the gun butt at the shoulder, the left hand in its proper place on the forearm and the right hand on the grip with the trigger finger on the trigger. The safety should be released or the gun cocked while the gun is on its way to the shoulder. As the gun comes into position, the head should be inclined so that the heek comes in contact with the gunstock thus bringing the rear sight into line with the target. If the left hand is in the proper position, the front sight will be in line, but it may be necessary to change the angle of the left elbow slightly before both sights are in line and the gun is ready to shoot.



Once this offhand shooting position is assumed, the relationship between the gun and the shooter should not be changed until after the shot. If the deer is moving, the body together with the gun should swivel to follow the target without changing the horizontal angle of the gun in its relation to the body.

The body should always be erect while shooting off-hand. If it should be necessary to change the elevation of the shooter's eye because intervening objects prevent a clear view of the target, bending the knees rather than the body should make this change. Bending the body will tilt the gun thus destroying the relationship between the line of sight and the bullet's trajectory. Many deer have been missed or only slightly wounded by hunters who have been out of position when they had perfect sight alignment, which did not correspond with the bullet's path.

When this ability for fast accurate sighting becomes instinctive and automatic with one particular gun, the use of another gun of different weight or balance, with different sighting arrangement, will cause the hunter some trouble on the fast shots. Usually, if the rear sight is the same on the two guns, this slow-down will be negligible, but if the rear sight is higher or lower than on the gun to which the hunter is accustomed, he will need to change the position of his cheek on the stock in order to raise or lower his eye position to correspond with the sights of the gun. This causes a considerable slow-down, which could be important on some of the shots that require split-second timing.

This slow-down is particularly noticeable when a man changes from open sights to one of the high-mounted telescope sights. Furthermore, when changing the cheek position in order to reach the higher eyepiece, there is a momentary partial obscurement of vision as the rim of the sight passes between the target and the eye. There is also a tendency to tilt the gun in order to bring the sight nearer to the eye level. Any tilting can be detected by the position of the cross hairs in the sight and is automatically corrected by the shooter.

From this article, we learned that when the ability of a hunter for fast accurate sighting becomes instinctive and automatic with one particular gun, the use of another gun of different weight or balance, with different sighting arrangement, will cause the hunter some trouble on the fast shots.