Like bickering children the guns rattle about the back of the truck as we thump over a speedbump at the casino's entry, The Grand Casino, one of a handful of dockside casinos to recently blossom in the dancefloor-flat loam of the Mississippi Delta, near the town of Tunica, presents an impressive-if-queereven surreal-scene: A plastic-looking village of multi-storied, windowless neon-trimmed buildings rising out of fields that for decades produced just enough cotton and soybeans to maintain the county's rank as the nation's very poorest. But times have changed:

More than 6000 hotel rooms have been added to the area in the last five years, and entertainers like Regis Philbin and Jay Leno drop in to amuse the gamblers. This where just a few years ago a night's diversions might have included a shoddy bluesman playing at a highway-side juke joint, a car parked at the banks of an oxbow with its doors open and its radio playing, or maybe, in the fall, some coonhunting on the other side of the levee. Nowadays, an old coonhunter I know-a gravel-voiced ex-farmer who never made it past the eighth grade-is said to be pocketing close to $400,000 a month leasing otherwise-worthless floodplain to a casino. In all, Delta casinos are grossing $150 billion annually. Somehow, it seems, the business of inciting people to hazard their money works even in a place where no one really has any. But we're not here to gamble; that was last night, and we'll get to that story soon enough. The four of us, with our quartet of shotguns bickering in the truck's way-back, are here to shoot. "Where's the clays course?" says our driver, a chef of some note, to a valet standing beside a tour bus. The valet puts a finger to his lips, like a stumped gameshow contestant. In front of the truck, an old man in wraparound sunglasses is shouting at his wife, demanding she take a photograph of the fountains.

"Yonder over that hill, I think," the valet finally says.

"He must not be from around here," whispers the man in the passenger seat, whom we call Boy Railroad, after his alter-ego, an imaginary superhero who tends to emerge after dark, and typically in saloons. "The only hill in this part of the Delta is the levee. Unless"- he turns back to me-"he's talking about that pile of money you lost last night."

The three of them, including my pal Bruce Browning ("like the shotgun," he is wont to say), a retired conga drummer, are here for fun- to powder a few clays. But for me it's medicine: the first symptoms of my malady came early in the season, in southwest Georgia, while I was hunting doves with my father-in-law. Doves flitted across the millet field, and I shot at them. The doves kept flitting. There are certain things you don't want to do in the presence of your father-in-law, and shooting poorly is one of them-especially if your fatherin-law carries a gun for a living. "I'm afraid we ought to talk to the man who sold you those shells," he said, after a while. "There's nothing in them."

Back at home, I tried whetting my shooting with the help of my wife, who turned out to be vaguely unfamiliar with hand-throwers; she slung the first clay into the side of my head, knocking me over, after which we promptly abandoned the exercise. I couldn' t imagine what had happened to my shooting. I'd learned to shoot on birds, not clays, and by instinct, not instruction. So the more I tried to break my shooting down to its components-down to the struts and crossbeams of stance and lead and swing-the more my skills seemed to wither, like a leaf curling hotly under a magnifying glass. More doves eluded me, followed by happy ducks. In a desperate moment, I even put one of my shells to my ear and shook it. It was full of shot, indeed, and I sighed. Somehow, it appeared, I had become Elmer Fudd.

The 250-acre Willows Sporting Clays Center at the Grand Casino features two wooded clays courses along with three other features, including two pointbased shooting games: "Make-a-Break" and "FiveStand Shooting." There's also an exclusive, "Duck Flush," in which three shooters blast away at up to 75 targets launched every second or so, in crossing and receding patterns, from seven computer-activated throwers. (The latter is supposed to simulate ducks coming into a blind, though in my time hunting ducks I've never found myself in water so good that ducks swarmed down upon me at one-second intervals. Except when I'm relieving myself, that is-they always come in like that then.)

Sporting clays, for the record, is a sport of British origin-much like golf, which it spookily resembles. Invented in the 1920s by British bird-hunters as a way of keeping up their chops in the off-season, sporting clays came across the Atlantic just two decades ago, when the first U.S. course was built near Houston, Texas. It works like this: At each station (typically ten, though the Willows features fourteen), shooters take their places inside tight, three-sided wooden cubicles, taking their turns at a variety of shots: the "Fur and Feather," for instance, in which a half-inch-thick target rolls along the ground while a low-flying target skims along above it, or the "Flushing Quail," in which the target imitates-no surprise-a flushing quail. First the shooter tries at singles; then at report pairs, in which the second target is thrown at the moment the first is hit (or missed); and finally at a round of doubles. Each station is scored according to how many targets are hit-like golf, more or less, except with earplugs.

The Willows' director, Bill Daniels, a National Sporting Clays Association Level One instructor, meets us at our carts-golf carts modified to hold shotguns, extending the analogy-with our course guide. The chef fires first, at Station One, and does as well as we'd expected; this is a man with eleven duck calls hanging from his rearview mirror, a man who regularly abandons his restaurant to chase birds in South America, an adroit and zealous hunter. I follow. "Just think of the targets as blackjack chips," Boy Railroad tells me, quietly, as I position myself in the cubicle. "Make 'em vanish. Just like last night." But this isn't funny, and I tell him so.

Oh, the casino: packed with old women in purple stockings dropping token after token into the slot machines with that dull expression old people get when they're tired of staring at the floor. A few fat farmers, done with their harvesting, now commencing their annual four-month bourbon binges. Skinny old men cashing government checks. The blips and whirs of machinery. Then me: Watching chip after chip sucked across the blackjack table, with a dread consistency nearly incomprehensible in its devotion to the house. More blips, whirs. Busted, broke. In the morning Boy Railroad loaned me the money for a cup of coffee.

"Pull," I tell the course guide, who's still somewhat groggy from last night's David Lee Roth show at the casino. Into the sky rises a target, straightup, like a bolting pheasant, and I lead with the barrel, fireand miss.

"You jumped the bird," the guide tells me. The voice is calm, knowing, slightly hung over. "Just keep the lead steady, and concentrate on the followthrough."

"Think blackjack chips," Boy Railroad says. "Harness the loss."

Another single rises, and I lead, this time more smoothly. I fire-and hit. Six more targets rise, as report rounds, then as doubles, and all drop to the ground as dust. "You see?" Boy Railroad says, his peppery beard widening with a grin. "Full stomach, slow shooter. It's an old Indian saw. A man can't go fat and lazy into the field."

The next station goes precisely the same, with seven of eight targets disappearing in that lovely, grainy way. At the third station, the "Fur and Feather," I ace them all. Boy Railroad's smile widens, and he slaps my back lightly In the cart, en route to the next station, I stare at my resting shotgun, a 20-guage, open-choked Remington Model 1100, and whisper to it, "Fickle witch."

"Now when did this problem of yours start?" asks Boy Railroad, as Bruce Browning stands behind the "Flighting Dove" station's cubicle, watching the chef, who's apparently doing well.

"Couple months ago. Opening of dove season."

"What'd you have in the freezer then?"

The chef performs a brief dance as he exits the cubicle, yelling a choppy and peculiar phrase he picked up a week or so ago from a Japanese customer, which translates, roughly, as follows: "I am not a baby! I am not a baby!" It puzzles me.

"Let me think," I say to Boy Railroad. "I had a wild turkey in there, and some venison hams from last year. Couple of ducks. Oh, and that Kool-Aid ice cream I made in the summer. Sounded better than it tasted. A shame."

This answer seems to please him.

"Your turn," Bruce tells me.

The dove-like targets move quickly, like flying razor blades, but I manage fairlymuch better, at least, than I had in the field. "Good," the guide says. "You jump that bird with your lead, and it's hard to get back. Much better."