News of the Vice President's Misfire Hits A Fellow Bird Hunter Where It Hurts

I say: He was really lucky.

He was lucky to be so superb a wing shot that he carried a shotgun in 28-gauge rather than 12-gauge. That probably saved Harry Whittington's life. The 28 is for advanced bird hunters who've killed their thousands with a 12 -- the common hunting shell of America's shotgunners -- and want something more refined, lighter, more beautiful. With the 28 you have to get closer, shoot faster and more accurately. The little pieces of shot break their cluster sooner, spray more widely, lose velocity faster.

Nevertheless, it shouldn't have happened; the bottom line is that the vice president should not have whirled, tracked a flying bird and fired.

I speak of these matters as a man who has violated that principle himself and almost paid for it in grief and shame. Instead, and oh so luckily, I have only bad memories. It looks as though that'll be Cheney's fate as well.

My almost kill wasn't a lawyer, it was a dog. (No jokes, please!) It happened on a bright day in upper Baltimore County where, with two friends and a guide, I was walking the grounds of a game reserve. We were hunting not quail but pheasant over a dog. "Over a dog": The quaint Britishism conveys the interplay between man, bird and dog as it unfolds in real space, a rolling crest of meadow and low brush and glades of trees.

On this day, I happened to be shooting very well. It's a pleasure that is difficult to express, and I won't bother trying, because if you don't get it, you'll never get it (here, Hunters@washpost.com -- go ahead, tell me what a monster I am, you'll feel so much better). I seemed to be seeing better than usual (new glasses) and the birds were breaking my way.

The elegance of it is so satisfying: The gun comes up, unwilled; you track the bird, as by some alchemy you become the gun and sense when your barrel -- that smudge of dark at the bottom of the melange of imagery your eye has conjured -- is past your target the right amount and then the gun seems to fire itself. All this happens, to steal a phrase from le Carre, at a speed which has no place in time: If you're thinking KEEP THE GUN MOVING, it's already too late.

On this shot, the bird broke low and straight, a right-to-left passer, about 25 yards out, and I was on it. Even as I felt all the right things happening I was aware that something was blinking ABORT MISSION in the bottom left of the sight picture, even if my conscious mind had not yet intercepted it. Too late: I fired, busted the bird in that satisfying cloud of feathers and wreckage, as it instantly loses its aerodynamicism and becomes just weight in air.

The next thing I saw as my barrel sped by was the dog.

He had been out there all the time, beyond the line. My subconscious knew he was there; my conscious, the really dumb part of me, never got the message.

The dog was fine. The dog didn't know that if I had fired a tenth of a second later, he would've had a nasty encounter with 200 or so No. 8 pellets.

But my friends and the guide knew exactly what had happened: hubris, arrogance, self-love, narcissism, all the truly destructive male pathologies. The point of hunting is to control them: I had not. The silence was louder than any expressions of anger, though the guide had a good reason to call me a stupid SOB. He didn't, but still I was.

You can't get those moments back. You can only learn from them. If you don't, then you're even stupider .