On a wintry Michigan morning, decades ago, I’d been posted with a 16-gauge Stevens double to shoot cottontails dashing past in front of Joe Wurtz’s beagle. Alas, cold fingers and keen anticipation got the better of me. I involuntarily stroked the trigger. The charge of sixes flew harmlessly into the sky; but I later had to explain that spent shell. Joe was mightily amused.
Pulling a trigger is so easy you can do it even when you don’t want to. Pulling a trigger at the right time and in the right way when you desperately want to hit a target, on the other hand, can be exceedingly difficult.
Because elk are big animals, imperfect shooting takes many of them down. If any hit in the vitals satisfies you, and you never shoot elk far away or through narrow alleys in brush, you’ll get along with just about any trigger and without practicing your trigger technique. But if you chide yourself for poor shooting even when it kills elk, and if center hits on animals showing only a slice of rib send shivers of delight up your spine, the short movement of your trigger matters a great deal.
A sentence from a hunting story written long ago has stuck with me. “My finger began the slow, steady crush.” The author evidently knew how to shoot. You don’t really pull a trigger. Pulling implies a heavy load and considerable travel; presumably, there’s neither in your trigger’s mechanism. You don’t really squeeze a trigger either. Squeezing is what a young man of my generation did with a young lady’s hand at the end of a date; it’s a compressing action that requires muscle contraction from all sides. Crushing may not perfectly describe your task, but it’s generally done evenly and slowly, against fixed resistance. You can crush a car body or a clover blossom. Of course, the trigger parts do not change shape. But the movement of your finger is properly smooth, slow and straight back, as if you were using that metal crescent to mash a currant.
You can’t put the crush on a trigger if your finger curls around it. The pressure of your finger on the sides of the trigger not only increases trigger drag, it changes during take-up, tugging the rifle to the side or rotating it around the axis of the barrel.
Some shooters equate take-up with creep—the trigger’s travel before it releases the sear. A more useful definition of take-up, in my view, is the movement of your finger.
A trigger with no discernible creep still offers resistance to your finger. After you contact the trigger, your finger muscles tense and your index pad flattens against the trigger. Increasing pressure changes the shape of your finger. Stiff resistance can even alter its angle as your knuckle arches to apply more force. You feel each shot before it happens, because your finger senses those changes and, like the sensation of your foot slipping on a rock, you anticipate the result. We get good at knowing just when our foot will lose contact and, after we’ve fired a rifle a few times, just when the sear will let go.
A little knowledge can ruin a shot, because your mind won’t separate the break of a trigger from the violence that follows. Noise and recoil and concussion from the muzzle train you to flinch. Anyone who says he can trigger an elk rifle without flinching might as well say he can take a second punch in the nose without blinking.
We may not flinch when the shot comes as a surprise, but once we learn a trigger and the surprise is gone, flinching is routine. Not every flinch sends the bullet astray. Our grip and shoulder muscles may tighten imperceptibly, securing the rifle more firmly but not markedly changing point of aim. Sometimes I feel my left bicep pressure the sling. A flinch that closes your eyes or slams your finger hard against the trigger or pulls your left arm skyward is not the same as shot anticipation.
Even if you’re shooting a very civil rifle like a .22 rimfire, you can flinch. In this case you’re not fearing blast and recoil; you’re afraid that the sight will move off target before you complete the crush, so you hurry it up. You jerk. But the bounce, quiver and drift of your sight across a target seldom move point of impact as far out of center as the rough trigger pull they provoke.
“Pull quickly when the sight dives to the middle,” said my coach Earl Wickman, “and you’ll eventually get a 10. The question is, how many 7s and 8s do you want first?” His solution to rifle movement still makes sense: Pressure the trigger when the sight is on target, hold pressure when it moves off. Intermittently applying a crush will fire the rifle when the sight is near center. You just need the discipline to resist snatching the trigger as your sight heads toward the middle.
Triggering also takes courage, however. You must crush when your aim is good. Archers know the paralysis of target panic—the inability to release an arrow when it is pointed just right. A gyrating rifle sight can induce paralysis too. You avoid milking that final ounce from the trigger when the sight picture looks good because you fear the sight will move just as you do. Naturally, the longer the rifle weighs on your arm, the less time it spends aimed at the middle and the wider the amplitude of sight movement.
In a steady position you have an easier time fighting paralysis, because the sight is less prone to meander. Seeing it linger in the middle gives you the confidence to shoot. Then, too, you’re less likely to disturb the rifle by pressing the trigger.
Recently I fired a flintlock rifle. It was hand-built, a lovely .45. The trigger was stiff, though, and after some seconds my left arm got tired. The sight, once making slow loops inside the black, began diving in and out. Instead of lowering the rifle and starting anew, I muscled the sight into the middle and hauled the final ounce from the trigger. The rifle fired in slow motion: Ka-chu-pow! By the time it got to pow, the sight had left the center, all the scoring rings and most of the surrounding paper. The glacial lock time of a flint gun only exaggerates what happens when you yank the trigger on a centerfire rifle. If you jerk instead of crush, you will muscle the sights off center. If you don’t hold that crush until the bullet exits, you’ll also miss. Remember that any contact with a rifle can help steady it, or force it off target. Your hands at grip and forend, your cheek on the comb and your shoulder cuddling the butt all serve to anchor a rifle. Your index finger need only fire it. But because it is the only body part that you deliberately move during a shot, it affects the rifle far out of proportion to its size. Last fall in northern Idaho, I lay on a rocky outcrop, my rifle leveled at a deer across a coulee. Dusk closed in as the buck foraged behind a thin screen of brush. Determined to shoot only if the animal moved free of every twig, I watched night encroach.
Then the buck took a step. I wanted to fire quickly. Running out of light and fearful the deer would enter a thicket, I fought to maintain that slow, steady crush. My prone position both helped and hindered. The crosswire was as still as if painted on the target. No need to hold pressure—only to increase it. On the other hand, I was tempted to hurry the shot.
A breath passed. My finger claimed the final ounce. The crack of my .257 Weatherby bounced back. So did the bullet’s audible impact. The buck dropped.
Accurate shooting is disciplined shooting, and discipline comes with practice. If you crush a trigger often enough from hunting positions, you learn to pace the pressure to the circumstance. Just as your gait might slow through thickets or quicken across meadows, so trigger action is best timed to the occasion. Delay when you can fire quickly and you tempt fate. The animal could move, or another could place itself in the bullet’s path. A shift in wind speed or direction could pull your bullet off its mark.
Once after a careful stalk I took my time aiming at a bedded buck. My dallying cost me the deer when a snow squall suddenly curtained the mountain with fat, wet flakes. Another time, a grand bull elk in a Montana meadow swapped ends as I dallied on the trigger, and I never saw him again.
Just last fall, hunting ibex in the mountains of Spain, I watched a tremendous ram bound up into brush at 250 yards. I’d thrown myself prone, the .280 over a backpack. Sling taut, I watched the animal gallop across a bench into the center of my scope field. I had him there for three or four seconds. Had I been faster on the trigger, I might have made the quartering shot.
Then again, in the heat of the moment, it’s easy to fire before the sight picture is right or to get rough with your trigger. It’s never a good idea to risk a miss or a crippling hit by shooting fast. That’s why I told my partner that losing my chance at the ibex was okay.
“But it was huge!” he screeched. “And this is the last day!”
Indeed. But odds for a lethal hit have nothing to do with trophy quality or time left afield. My decision to shoot rests only on my ability to make a good shot. The trigger is a firing device, not a crucifix.
Pre-season drills from hunting positions at various ranges, using targets of various sizes, will tell you how fast you can afford to be. They’ll also help you speed up without botching the shot. At Arizona’s Gunsite Academy a few years ago, instructor Eric Olds told me to shoot faster. The animal targets were big and close. My careful marksmanship was centering the vitals. “You don’t have to hit the middle,” said Eric. “You must only kill.” When he ran the targets on a two-second timer, I had to get the shot off right away or lose my chance. My bullets landed two or three times faster, and almost always in the lethal zone.
Elk in thickets dare you to fire quickly. They appear too big to miss, you’re close enough to panic them, and they’re only a jump from gone. But there’s a lot of air around an elk. I once missed a bull at 40 yards because I got hasty with the trigger. Another time, I tried to shoot with the safety on. If you don’t have time to shoot deliberately, you don’t have time to kill an elk.
Shots that look easy for only an instant can be—if you’ve trained for fast trigger work. Watch a champion steel-plate pistol shooter like Rob Leatham or Todd Jarrett. The clock won’t allow X-ring precision, but these wizards bang melon-size targets in such rapid succession it’s hard to count shots. They couldn’t do that if their trigger technique was inconsistent or disturbed the handgun. They couldn’t if they didn’t fire thousands of rounds in speed drills.
Good trigger work is easier with a stock that puts your hand in the right place and at the proper angle. I prefer an open grip that’s easy on the carry and quick on the point, one that puts my hand at a high angle. Wrist muscles twist as I cheek the rifle. My hand on the grip and the butt in my shoulder retain that wrist angle and muscle tension, which in turn leave my trigger finger free to do one job only. A long grip keeps my hand well back, so the trigger falls just forward of the first joint of my index finger. My finger pad moves back in a straight line. There’s plenty of leverage for a light touch, no pinch from the joint. But just as people hold pencils in different ways, so it is with triggers. Whatever your choice of rifle grip and finger placement, consistency counts.
The trigger itself must also behave consistently. But it needn’t be super-sensitive. Though competitive shooters prefer break-weights of a few ounces, hunting triggers are best kept between 2 and 4 pounds. It’s hard to find triggers lighter than 2; and you might have trouble controlling a break that light when your finger gets stiff with cold. A trigger taking more than 4 pounds pressure is, to my mind, unnecessarily heavy. If yours can’t be adjusted to suit you, get a replacement from Timney.
After decades of acceding to attorneys who care more about liability than field accuracy, gun companies are offering useful triggers. Some, like Tikka’s, are adjustable for weight of pull without removing the stock. Kimber triggers come factory adjusted to break at a crisp 3 pounds. Savage’s AccuTrigger is an ingenious device that combines security with a light pull. The Winchester 70 trigger is sturdy and consistent, but you’ll refine the pull only by stoning. For 2007 Remington has a new M700 trigger—the first in 44 years. It fits the Model Seven too, and should be a standard feature by the time you read this. Its factory-adjusted pull is up to 45 percent lighter than on the earlier trigger and better resists corrosion. The safety blocks sear and trigger, lifting a sear safety cam off the trigger when on “safe.” The bolt can be manipulated with the safety engaged.
Trigger movement before the break needn’t be eliminated. In fact, it can’t be. But imperceptible creep appeals to me. I like generous over-travel—the trigger’s movement after the break. A little free movement keeps your finger from coming up hard against the stop, where it can disturb the rifle during the bullet’s release.
I think the contact surface of a trigger should be slim and with an open curve, like that of Winchester’s early M70. A forward-curving trigger feels heavy because it pinches your finger against the top of the guard, increasing drag while decreasing leverage. It also causes finger angle to shift during travel. A narrow trigger trumps a broad one because it allows your finger more control, just as a slender stock wrist gives your hand freedom to find a perfect weld.
Crushing a trigger takes very little time. So does thumbing a safety. Both have a lot to do with the success of your hunt. The trigger crush takes more practice.