I couldn't tell you how many times Tim and I went "hunting". I don't think we ever got anything other than pigeons in the barn and cooters in the ponds. It was just an excuse to get out of the house.

We started off with pellet rifles. He had a Crosman 760. I had Daddy's Franklin.

We usually used BBs because a little bag cost about a dime and pellets were a quarter.

Since they were both air rifles that you had to pump up, they could shoot through a tin can or a tin roof. We never shot road signs or windows or anything destructive. We mostly shot dirt clods or knot holes or pine cones.

BBs really don't fly as straight as you might think. I don't know about the Crosman, but the Franklin was smooth bored so the BBs weren't accurate. You might be an inch or two off at twenty feet.

We figured out that taking your time on a shot was critical. So was breathing and squeezing rather than jerking the trigger.

We eventually moved up from there to .22s and shotguns. The same rules applied .22s to the but now at a greater distance.

Shotguns had a different set of rules to learn. You have to lead birds in order to shoot them. You can't shoot anything 100 yards away, but you can pepper it. You only get one chance at whatever you're aiming for if you have a single shot. 

I miss those times going out with Tim. There's more than a thousand miles between us.

Once in a while I have to pull out the old pellet rifle and shoot pine cones just to remember what it's like.