When I was younger, and my dogs and I would find birds in the exact same spot year after year, I would sometimes feel a little guilty about it, as if we weren’t really quite hunting. It seemed we were using the knowledge of previous years rather than the more primal and direct responses of scent, sight, sound, intuition.

Such encounters seemed to be lacking the wild extravagance, flamboyance, and stunning originality of finding birds in new places, or places where you did not expect them, or places where you expected them but have never found them before. It’s as if the dogs and I knew a secret; as if the dogs and I held, in our experience, an unfamiliar advantage over the bird hiding in that one, same spot.

What I think now, however, is that there is something just as flamboyant and spectacular in the eerie parallels of sameness that proceed, now and again, finding a bird beneath the same cottonwood, or in the precise same strand of cattails. These replications call out to us to notice them more deeply, not less, in their enduring sameness: like the teacher who desires that the students learn by rote or brute force of memorization certain of the most important lessons.

At one time or another, everyone who shoots a firearm flinches. It doesn’t matter if it’s a magnum rifle, a .22 target pistol, or a 20-gauge shotgun, shoot long enough and one day you will flinch. And, when you flinch, you will in all likelihood miss whatever it was you were shooting at.

Ah, you say: So if you hit your target, it wouldn’t matter if you flinched?

The answer is yes, and that gives us an insight into the nature of shooting itself. Because, after a lifetime of shooting, watching others shoot, and reading accounts of shooting, I have come to the conclusion that everyone flinches, to some degree, every time they pull the trigger.

The difference is, when you miss, it’s called a flinch. When you don’t miss, it’s something else.

If there is magic on this planet,” wrote Loren Eisley, “it is contained in water.” The great scientist-essayist had deep philosophical thoughts in mind, but his words also have meaning for a first time turkey hunter in the arid Texas Hill Country.

A brief glimpse of a fabulous collection.

To read more visit www.thecontemporarywingshooter.com

Episode 32: Scott Linden, host of Wingshooting USA, sits atop a Tennessee Walker ambling across the prairie of the Fort Pierre National Grasslands in search of sharptails and prairie chickens. Nothing about the blue sky, steady breeze, and big running English setters would strike a Midwest hunter as out of the norm for a South Dakota hunt.

Illustrations by Terra Brown

The hit, which Cale never saw coming, never saw period, knocked him out of the game, out of the season, and probably, given the way his mom reacted, out of football forever. Once he was back on his feet, crutches anyway, they did the whole hero routine back at school, everybody signing his cast, Brianna Jensen writing something on the back, at the very top, practically brushing his butt as she wrote, that left even Jaydon as close to speechless as he ever got, only one whispered, “Bloody hell.”

Primland is a resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains of  Virginia—12,000 acres of steep mountains and wooded valleys, of old cabins and hidden ravines, where the storied history of the Blue Ridge runs smack up against modern life.