“The big bull, rocking to and fro, his ears flapping flies with the sound of handclaps … he stood, lonely and huge and the color of the red ocher in the naked patch of dusty clay …. ‘Take a rest on the hill here,’ Brian whispered. ‘Hold it steady on that line between the ear slot and his eye …. a perfect setup for a brain shot. Okay. Take him.’”
So wrote Robert Ruark, in “Use Enough Gun.” Enough gun in this case might have been any gun hurling a jacketed solid, given the “perfect setup” and a clear path to the brain. The “rest on the hill” made a kill nearly certain. Brian Dermott, Ruark’s hero here and in “Uhuru,” coaches his client well.
“The elephant dropped, collapsed as quickly as if somebody had let all the air out of him….
‘Jolly good shooting! Right smack on! But let him have the other half ….’”
The well-engineered shot is like dinner in a fine restaurant, every element carefully measured and executed. Results are predictable.
Conditions preceding a shot, however, are
