I select the articles I put on the web site carefully because it takes me a good deal of time to post each one. Normally, I look for articles I think many people will want to read. I do not think people are normally attracted to reading about hunting accidents or first aid. I selected this article to work on because I know a serious hunting accident can happen to anyone. My personal experience satisfies nearly every statistical norm established in the North Dakota Outdoors article.
I was a junior in high school and my brother Dan was a sophomore. It was the day before Thanksgiving break and everyone was anxious for the holiday vacation to begin. Classes ended early because of the holiday and we decided to drive back to the farm on back roads looking for pheasants.
Several miles from town we saw a nice rooster in the ditch. We parked the car in a field driveway and began walking back up the ditch toward the location where we had last seen the bird. The pheasant flushed, but instead of flying straight away from us as is typical, it flew back directly between us. I was using an old double-barrell 12 gauge my grandfather had given me. This old gun had external hammers and I was pulling back the hammer with my thumb as I starting to swing around on the bird. Somehow in the motion of bringing the gun to my shoulder my thumb slipped. The gun fired and the charge struck my brother at nearly point-blank range. The point of impact was the large muscle on top of the shoulder adjacent to the neck. Dan dropped to the ground and I must say that my first comment was "What happened?" I still remember that my brother looked at me with a kind of funny look and said, "You shot me!" I managed to get my brother into the car and into the small town doctor's office. It was a serious injury - the shot punched a hole through the entire muscle leaving the wads behind in the wound. Still, we were both very lucky. As you might expect, this is the kind of life experience that stays with you and can be quite troubling if you think about if for too long.
While I regard my personal experience as more bad fortune than stupidity, I suppose there were things in the situation I should have done differently. Had I been older and more experienced, I probably would not have swung on a bird moving toward another person - especially a person three feet away. As you grow older and can draw on more experiences, you probably make more appropriate decisions on instinct.
After hearing this story, someone once asked me if my brother ever went hunting with me again. He did and he remains an avid hunter to this day. Some in North Dakota may know Dan - he worked with the Soil Conservation Service in Minot, Grand Forks, and Devils Lake before leaving the state serveral years ago to work in Iowa.