"I was shooting at age 6, using a 12-gauge when I was 9," said Matt, legend enough in this Olympic Peninsula town to have a statue of his likeness erected after he won the Olympic gold.

Everything in shooting, insist the Drykes, starts not with the gun, stance or ammunition, but with the eyes. The eyes capture the moving target, send the information to the brain and everything else follows. If the eyes are used improperly, or like me, don't work properly, then more targets are missed.

Matt diagnosed me further. Being right handed and using my left eye to shoot a camera, he explained, presents no real problem for taking pictures. But shooting a shotgun from my right shoulder with a dominant left eye was something else.

"You might have to wink down," Matt said, suggesting I briefly close by left eye as I mount the gun. That would give my right eye an opportunity to dominate the field of vision and greatly increase my chances of connecting with the target.

"If you can get visually correct," Chuck confirmed shortly afterwards, "you've got a great chance. If you can't see it, you can't hit it.

" Matt credits his dad for coining the "quiet mind, hungry eyes" concept. Chuck credits his son for epitomizing the technique.

Together the Drykes continue to work with average gunners like me and my Spokane friends, John Prideaux and Larry Shook, to not only help us hit more moving targets, but understand why we miss.

"If you're visually on track," reasoned Matt, "it does ease the pain

." So John, Larry and I loaded up our shotguns and made the trip to Sunnydell Shooting Grounds to learn from some of the best. Chuck Dryke and john go way back to the late 1960's, when Chuck began captaining the gun team at the annual Inland Empire English Springer Spaniel Club field trial held in Walla Walla.

If the truth were known, Chuck said, he got into shotgun instruction through dogs. "It all evolved from training dogs for people," he recalled. "The dogs were great, but the people couldn't hit the bird.

" Today, Sunnydell Shooting Grounds shows the finely tuned wear of a long-established gun club geared to offering shooters an unparalleled test of their skills. Clay targets are tossed from traditional trap and skeet courses or launched at a variety of angles and speeds throughout a sporting clay course.

John, Larry and I opted to gun the sporting clay stations. But before we shouldered a gun, Chuck ran us through his eye clinic. Remember: quiet mind, hungry eyes.

Form follows function in the eye clinic. Chuck took us indoors and subjected us to a number of vision checks, teaching us that the eye always focuses on the target, not the end of the gun barrel or anything else.

To that end, he had John, Larry and I doing exercises like sighting over our thumbs at letters on the wall. We moved quickly with our eyes first from one letter to the next, then brought our thumbs into the picture.

Eventually, we graduated to wooden guns, always focusing our eyes on the target and leaving the barrel a blur. The gun will follow the eyes, sad Chuck. Move the eyes first, then bring the gun along.

We graduated to outside, where we played catch with beanbags and tossed them in a bucket to test our hand-eye coordination. We found ourselves being humbled by contraptions designed and built by Chuck to simulate shooting without taking a shot.

My favorite was the rope-a-dope. Like the name suggests, we dopes shouldered our wooden shotguns as the rope stretched across the face of a building, traveled on a series of pulleys like a fan belt on a car engine. A white target was fixed to the rope and when the target came into view we all focused and pointed our guns, following through with a sustained lead.

"Concentrate on the target," Chuck instructed. Frankly, the instruction was too involved to write about here. You had to be there to understand all the nuances.

Suffice it to say the next morning, John, Larry and I put our newfound understanding of vision to the test. Some 400 rounds apiece later, all of us were breaking targets, and missing, with renewed confidence and understanding.

When he won gold at the Olympics, Matt was shooting for the U.S. Army. He missed only two of 200 targets, going 50 straight on the last day of competition.

"I had all the targets I wanted to shoot around here when I was young," said Matt, explaining how, in addition to winning the gold medal, he got his start on setting a number of national and world records.

John, Larry and I had had all the targets we could shoulder by the time the lessons ended. Then Chuck left us with the extended version of the mantra.

"The powers of the eyes. Vision is the key thing that motivates the brain and body. Head down on the gunstock with the eyes in line with the barrel. Eyes out to the target, not on the gun rib or sights. Locate the target with your eyes before you move the gun. Follow through after the shot."