Jack O’Connor’s Ode to the Humble Rifle Rest

This story, “Hit with a Rest,” appeared in the May 1973 issue of Outdoor Life.

Back in 1943 when I was on my first packtrip into the Canadian Rockies I asked Roy Hargreaves, my outfitter and guide, who the best shots were among the men he took out every fall. Without hesitation he told me that the most-skilled riflemen among his dudes were the woodchuck hunters from the Eastern U.S. The worst shots, he said, were the deer hunters who went into the woods for an annual jaunt but never touched a rifle otherwise.

I could see his point. In those days the use of the scope sight was by no means universal among big-game hunters, but all woodchuck hunters used glass. The woodchuck hunters were accustomed to shooting at small targets at long and uncertain ranges. To be successful they had to learn to shoot from the steadiest possible positions and to squeeze their shots off so gradually that they did not disturb their aim.

In high grass or weeds the woodchuck hunter must shoot from the sitting position, sometimes with a sling and sometimes without. If the terrain and the height of the grass permit it, the chuck hunter shoots from prone with a sling or from a rest.

Anyone who is learning how to shoot a rifle discovers quickly that the human anatomy was not designed to be the perfect shooting platform. The human carcass is full of wobbly joints, jumpy nerves, quivering muscles, pulsating blood vessels, and various other pieces of equipment that have a tendency to shake and rattle.

The bum shot tries to beat the wobble by yanking the trigger when things look just right. The result is a flinch that makes matters worse. The expert tries to hold as steadily as possible and then let off with no disturbance of aim. The crack revolver shot concentrates on his sights and squeezes off so gradually that he doesn’t know when the old roscoe is going off.

The steadier the sights are against the target, the less apt the shooter is to try to yank his shot off. And the best way to keep the sights from jumping around is to shoot from a rest. This is not to say that a good shot from a rest is always an all-around big-game shot. Often he isn’t. The finished game shot can snap off a quick one at a bounding buck in the brush. He can swing ahead of a running antelope and squeeze the trigger with the sight moving ahead of his target. He can get off a precise shot while sitting on a hillside where a rest or a prone position would be impossible.

But even the best shots know that they should take advantage of every opportunity to improve their position-and that includes the use of a rest.

The more experience the rifleman-hunter has, the more affection he shows for the steadiest possible position. If he has a choice between standing and kneeling, he kneels. If he must choose between kneeling and sitting, he picks the steadier sitting position. If he has a chance to shoot prone, down he goes. And if he has an opportunity to take a rest, he grabs it.

I grew up in Arizona and learned my field shooting there and in the Mexican state of Sonora. Since those happy days it has been my great privilege to have the opportunity to pop away at big game from Alaska to southern Mexico, from Idaho to India, and from Scotland to southern Africa. Much of Arizona is pretty hilly, and what isn’t hilly is apt to be carpeted with sharp rocks or cactus thorns.

Since slamming one’s belly prone onto cactus is uncomfortable and since shooting from a hillside at something across a canyon is generally feasible only in the sitting position (prone is impossible), I have probably shot more game from the sit than from any other position. In the fall of 1971, for example, my modest bag of big game consisted of one Stone ram shot in British Columbia from a rest and one Montana mule deer and one Idaho whitetail shot from the sit.

However, I have an abiding affection for the rest and use one whenever possible.

I know of no better way to distinguish the experienced from the inexperienced hunter than to see what position he assumes when he shoots. The inexperienced man bangs away willy-nilly. I have seen hunters shoot offhand at deer and antelope 500 yards away. The cool old-timer operates from the steadiest possible position, even if the range is fairly short and the shot easy. The best way to cool off an incipient attack of buck fever is to see the sights or the scope reticle steady against the game.

Like 999 hunters out of 1,000, I have been subject to the momentary fits of jitters and shakes called buck fever. Nothing cures this miserable malady as well as a rest.

I shot my first lion in Tanzania in 1953. He had been feeding on a bait, and the sign told us that he had left it only minutes before. We knew he was nearby. The problem was to find him.

As we began casting around, my throat was dry and I began to shake. When we finally saw him he was sitting in high grass on his haunches like a dog and looking hungrily back at the bait. All I could see was his head and neck. The shot he offered was not difficult, but I eased myself over to an anthill a few yards away and took a rest. The sight of the crosswires in the 3X scope steady against his neck acted like a tranquilizer. When I sent the 270-grain .375 bullet on its way, I hadn’t the slightest doubt in the world that he was my lion. He was.

But sometimes the game does not cooperate, and then the rifleman should have a few more tricks in his bag.

In 1959, on the Kilombero River in southern Tanzania, I was earnestly pounding my ear at dawn when a pride of lions began to roar not far away. A moment later my professional hunter, John KingsleyHeath, came rushing into my tent with a gunbearer to tell me that one of the lions was a male and that we’d better get cracking. I hastily threw on some clothes, grabbed the .375, and galloped clumsily after John and Kiebe, the gun bearer.

As we neared the site of the roaring, a lioness stuck her head up out of the grass. A moment later the head of a maned lion popped up to look us over. They were about 150 yards away.

Like any sensible and experienced lion hunter, I started pussyfooting over to an anthill about 20 yards away to take a rest. But instead of playing fair and staying put, the lion galloped off, quartering away. By reflex I mounted the .375 and swung along with him. As the intersection of the crosswires moved about two feet ahead of his chest the picture was so pretty that I couldn’t resist squeezing the shot off. The big cat gave the half-roar, half-growl of a wounded lion and disappeared into high grass. As it turned out, luck was with me.

The lion had been shot squarely through the heart. However, I consider shooting at an unwounded running lion at 150 yards to be a damned fool stunt and a good way to get into serious trouble. Prior to World War I, when Kenya was called British East Africa, a high percentage of the adventurous young Englishmen buried in the Nairobi cemetery had got there because they foolishly had taken pokes at running lions or had shot at them from unsteady positions.

A generation or so ago I had a somewhat acrimonious exchange of letters with a character who had denounced me in the public prints because I had gone about shooting various animals with “little, inadequate” rifles like the .270, the 7×57, and the .30/06. As a rule I prefer to avoid rhubarbs, but this citizen was so plainly determined to make a boob out of me in public that I had no choice but to call him.

This man let the world know that he was a dead-game sport who was so full of fair play and sportsmanship that he always gave the game a chance. He never shot at an animal unless it was running flat out, he said, and to ensure instant kills he used weapons with large and formidable holes in the ends of the barrels. His idea of a nice little deer rifle was the .375 Magnum. He looked upon hunters who shot from steady positions with the same contempt he bestowed on those who dealt from the bottom of the deck in poker games, sold worthless stock to poor and trusting widows, or ran off with their friends’ wives.

Now everything this joker wrote showed that his hunting experience had been in the pages of outdoor magazines or in the pink and scented clouds of fantasy — not in the field. Shooting at a running animal, though often necessary, is not giving the animal a break — rather it is giving it a chance to get away wounded. No matter how good a running shot anyone is, he is much less sure of a hit in the right place than if he shoots at a standing animal, and from a steady position. Making up for poorly placed shots by using a heavy bullet sounds a lot better in theory than it works out in actuality. There simply is no substitute for correct shot placement.

It is, of course, seldom possible to shoot from a rest when hunting deer in woods and brush. Deer are pretty foxy, and even if a hunter sees them first at close quarters he seldom gets a standing shot. Furthermore, if a hunter is lucky enough to get a close-range shot at a standing or slowly moving deer, he should immediately take advantage of his opportunity by shooting offhand instead of hunting for a rest.

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In more-open country, rest shooting at deer pays off. I know a woodchuck hunter who gets his buck every fall by shooting across a meadow from a rest at about 250 to 300 yards. In his area the deer come out of the woods at daybreak to feed in the meadow. He gets on his stand before dawn with his scope-sighted rifle, a good pair of binoculars, and a rest. When the buck he wants walks out he simply squeezes off his shot.

The stalker generally can use a rest. For one thing, he often shoots at standing or undisturbed, slowly-moving animals. For another, he usually approaches low along the ground and is in a pretty good position to use a rest.

A typical situation in sheep hunting, for example, is to find a ram at long range by using binoculars and spotting scope and then to work out a route by which the ram can be approached from behind a ridge. At the end of the stalk the hunter peeks over, sees his ram, and rests his rifle securely on a grass hummock, a stone, a rucksack, or some other firm object. If the rifle rest is hard he pads it with his left hand, his hat, a jacket, or something else soft (without such padding the shot tends to fly high). Then he cuts loose with an exactly placed shot.

I have shot only three Rocky Mountain bighorns. Two were taken from a rest. I collected my first above Chocolate Creek, a tributary of the Muddy water River in Alberta. The ram was lying about 200 feet above the creek on a bare ridge with his rump toward me. When my guide Roy Hargreaves and I completed the stalk we were lying behind another ridge across a draw and about 125 yards from the ram.

I was faced with a dilemma often encountered by sheep hunters. If I shot the ram in the fanny I would destroy meat. If I shot him in the neck, I might ruin the scalp. If I waited for him to move I might not get a shot at all, for one jump would put him out of sight. I knew that if I put a .270 bullet into his rump he wouldn’t go far, and since I was primarily after a trophy and not meat I held right in the middle of the left side of his rump. At the shot, the ram jumped up and ran downhill with his left hind leg dragging from a broken hip. I rolled him with a shot through the lungs as he ran.

Another sheep story:

In the Yukon in the days when hunters were allowed two sheep to a license, my guide Field Johnson and I completed a very long stalk on a bunch of Dall rams on a raw snowy day. We came up behind a knife-edged ridge and found that the sheep had changed position and were a good deal farther away than we had thought. They had moved to get out of the worst of the storm. One old-timer, off by himself, had heavily broomed, massive-looking horns. He was lying broadside. The rest of the bunch was to the left and about 50 yards farther away.

I looked the rams over carefully with 8 x 30 binoculars. I decided to take the ram with the broomed horns first and then try for the largest ram. I took off my down jacket and with it padded a notch in the rocks of the ridge. I wiped the moisture off the lenses of my scope, rested my .30 /06 on the jacket, squirmed into a comfortable position, and held just under the backbone of the ram lying broadside. He did not move after the shot.

The other rams all ran directly away. As the largest was about to disappear into the canyon beyond, I held between his horns to allow for lead and bullet drop. Field and I heard the bullet strike, and the ram disappeared. We found him at the bottom of the sharp little canyon.

The best, surest, and most-sportsmanlike way to collect a pronghorn antelope is by a procedure much like sheep hunting. The rifleman should first spot the buck antelope he wants and then figure out a route for the stalk that will keep him out of sight and keep the wind right. When the hunter arrives at the shooting point, he should shoot from an improvised rest.

The ever-present sagebrush of the Western plains makes a handy rest. I have shot several buck antelope by putting my 10-gallon hat, a jacket, or some other item on a bush, resting the rifle on it, and cutting loose. Once, when I had to shoot from a bare ridge, I folded a large bandana handkerchief, laid it on top of a binocular case, and rested my rifle on it.

In 1944 I hunted elk in Wyoming. After passing up several fine bulls, I found a real buster. He was with a harem of at least a dozen cows near the head of a creek in an enormous basin right at timberline.

We planned to stalk the bull by sneaking up the timber along the creek, but the binoculars showed us that the timber was full of young bulls waiting for a chance to dash out and have at one of the big fellow’s cows. A stalk was out of the question. We were on a high bench above the elk, and I would have to shoot from there, pass the bull up, or wait for him to move in a favorable direction. Since it was midafternoon and we were a long way from camp, I decided to risk a shot.

I was using a custom-made .270 on a Mauser action with a Sukalle barrel and a stock by Al Linden. The scope was a 2½X Noske with a four-minute Lee dot. Through BX binoculars and the spotting scope the bull looked nice. He was in the shade and so far away that through the rifle scope I could not make out the massive antlers. I decided to shoot. I could use a perfect rest, and since the elk was in an open basin I could keep him in sight and get additional shots in case I wounded him. Chances were rather good that he could not escape.

From the amount of elk subtended by the four-minute dot, I estimated that the bull was about 600 yards away. Dividing the ground between us and the elk into 100-yard pieces also gave me around 600 yards. My rifle was sighted to put a 130-grain bullet, with a muzzle velocity of 3,140 f.p.s., at point of aim at 300 yards. At around 600 yards the drop would be about 40 to 45 inches. At 600 yards a four-minute dot subtends 24 inches. I decided to try to hold the center of the dot 1½  dots, or 36 inches, above the top of the bull’s back.

In the meantime the bull, which had been standing broadside, lay down facing in my direction. I sat on one rock, which was about the height of a chair, and put my down jacket on another, which was about the height of a bench rest. The reticle of the scope was rocksteady, with the center of the dot about three feet above the spot where the bull’s neck joined his body.

As the shot echoed through the big basin, the young bulls in the timber and the cows ran in every direction. The old bull lurched to his feet and stood broadside. Charlie Peterson, the guide, said he had heard the bullet strike. Ernie Miller, the outfitter, said he’d seen dust fly to the right.

With the same hold as before, I cut loose again. This time Ernie, who was watching the elk with binoculars, yelled that he saw dust fly right behind the bull’s shoulder. (The bull had been wallowing, and the mud was dry.) The big elk wobbled around for a few seconds and then pitched over dead. My first shot had broken his jaw as he faced us. The second had gone through his lungs.

That was the longest shot I have ever made on a game animal and the longest I have ever attempted. I had the advantages of plenty of time, of knowing the trajectory of my rifle, and of having a reticle in the scope that acted as a range finder. However, I never would have made the shot if I hadn’t had that rest.

Most of the hunting country of Africa is well supplied with “ant” hills. These are actually made by termites. Some varieties of these strange little creatures build hills only about a foot high and about the size of hives used by domestic bees. Other hills are 30 or 40 feet high and have trees growing on them. Fortunately a great many are about the right size to conceal a hunter in the last stages of a stalk and to shoot from when he gets there. If I have a good record on African game, much of it is due to those extremely handy termite hills.

A reasonably solid rest can be improvised by grasping a branch or the trunk of a small tree with one hand and resting the fore-end of the rifle over that wrist. Forks of a tree can also be utilized. Whatever you use as an improvised rest, remember that the rifle will recoil away from a solid object, and thus solid rests should be padded by the hand or by hats, jackets, scarfs, or some other soft item.

The old professional buffalo hunters of the Western plains were great believers in rests, great skeptics about miraculous offhand and running shots, and profound admirers of the well-placed shot. They used expensive, accurate rifles of great power for those days, the best grade of English black powder, and primitive (but apparently effective) telescope sights. They carried rest sticks with them-two sticks joined by buckskin thongs (or so I have been told) and with sharpened ends to thrust into the ground.

Most buffalo hunters liked to shoot prone, but when grass was high they used higher sticks and shot from the sitting position. A market hunter who shot deer, elk, and antelope in the bad old days told me that he always carried a sharpened stick. He liked to shoot from the sitting position. He would plunge the stick into the ground, grasp it with his left hand, and rest the fore-end of his rifle over his wrist.

Various outfits make rests for use in varmint hunting. Some of them damp onto the barrel, others onto the fore-end. Those that attach to the fore-end are best, since the barrel rests tend to make a rifle shoot high. Most of these rests are bipods and in principle are like the rest sticks used by the buffalo hunters. Most are made to be used from the prone position, but some can be adjusted high enough to be used from sitting.

Bausch & Lomb makes a good rest. It was reviewed in the Shooting department of this magazine some months ago.

One of the best rests I have ever seen was sent to me some years ago. It was a bipod with a rubber-padded portion for the fore-end of the rifle to rest This section was made like the Greek letter omega (Ω) turned upside down and would hold the fore-end of the average sporter tight enough so that the rifle could be carried with the rest attached. You could adjust the height by turning a little wheel. This gimmick really simplified steady holding on distant rockchucks.

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I have never done so, but I have often thought that it would not be a bad idea to take a light bipod rest along on a plains or mountain hunt. Usually a satisfactory rest can be improvised, but I have seen the time when I would have given my left ear and part of my right for a bipod rest.  

The post Jack O’Connor’s Ode to the Humble Rifle Rest appeared first on Outdoor Life.

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