When I went shooting with Stuart we were always a bit competitive. We were both about eaksy peaksy with shotguns and I was a better rifle shot than him while he was far better with a pistol than I was. Pistol shooting, which had to be done on actual ranges and which was closely supervised , never did interest me much. Neither did any other kind of target shooting.... I only shot at targets when I was ranging in a rifle.
Stuart and I were in the same class at school and we did quite a lot of things together including chasing the dolly birds back in the sixties !
We both got shotguns just as soon as we were legally able to have them and we both promptly became "marsh cowboys." Neither of us knew anyone who went shooting , we did our learning as we went along.
Stuart read a book which described digging "graves" on the foreshore from which the occupant of the grave could quickly sit up from his totally prone position in order to shoot passing ducks. We used to go wildfowling at a place called "Cramond" on the outskirts of Edinburgh on the Forth estuary. We went there on Stuarts old banger of a motorbike armed with the shotguns and with old army surplus trenching tools. We arrived on the beach in complete darkness and dug ourselves a grave each about 20 -30 yards apart. Then we waited for first light and the ducks while lying flat on our backs in the very wet sand.
Two mallards flew near Stuart and he downed one of them and took it back to his grave ....we had no dog. Then the competitive stuff came into play. He'd placed the duck behind his head to act as a pillow and to rub in the fact that he'd shot a duck and I had not , he kept taunting me about how comfortable his "pillow" was. Then after maybe 10 minutes I heard him say...." Oh ! Oh you barsteward !" so I sat up in my grave to see what was wrong.
His head was shuddering and shaking and he continued to make funny noises and to issue cuss words. The duck he'd shot had probably only had one or two of the lead shot clip it's bill. Enough to knock it stone cold for a while but not dead. That duck now erupted from behind his head and promptly took to the air and buggered off !

He could not turn around in the grave to take a shot at the fast departing duck and it escaped.
I exploded with laughter and then I began the long and very enjoyable business of taking the p*ss out of him !

Stuart liked a good laugh but his sense of humour was always somewhat lacking when he was the butt of the laughter .....which made me laugh all the more !

Ours was almost a love/hate sort of relationship.
Wullie