It was late in the afternoon when it happened; the buffalo we’d been tracking for hours suddenly materialized in a brushy patch some 150 yards away. We’d been hunting all day in brush full of nothing, and then suddenly it was full of buffalo – all bulls and all looking huge like dump trucks on a residential city street. One bull in particular stared us down, his head lowered, glaring at us from underneath his massive brows. It’s that bull my PH (Professional Hunter) told me to shoot, setting the quintessential African shooting sticks up for me with a real sense of urgency. I laid my rifle across the sticks and stared back at the buffalo through the scope. There was a medium-thin screen of leaves and twigs obscuring him. My finger found the trigger…

The Optic-Ready 500 Turkey is one of three new pump-action shotguns from Mossberg. Red dots sights have been used on shotguns in 3-gun competition for decades and I know turkey hunters that put red dots on top of their turkey guns years ago as well, but Mossberg has raised the bar by lowering the red dot down into the receiver of the Optics-Ready 500 Turkey. Mossberg milled, drilled, and tapped the model 500 receiver to allow a small red dot optic to sit at almost the same height as the ventilated rib. I can see the fiber optic front sight in the window of the Holosun EPS I installed on the 500 Turkey 20 gauge.

My first shooting experience was with a Benjamin .177 pellet rifle. Its pump had fallen off a generation earlier and was repaired with a bent nail in place of the missing pin. The rear sight was also lost to history. This rifle taught me two valuable lessons. First, I needed to get as close as possible to my target to improve my chances of hitting it. Second, I learned the importance of consistently placing my cheek on the stock the same way every time. I later graduated to a single-shot .22 bolt-action rimfire rifle that my grandfather used during the Depression. According to his journal, a squirrel was worth just one penny more than a .22 bullet. Missing was not an option for him.