Flipping through Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, Third Edition (Macmillan, 1979), the copy given to me 39 years ago by Susan Currie after I told her I would like to spend more time writing.
In the "Approach to Style" chapter there is an analogy that had me wondering why E.B. White likened the writer to "a gunner" when the context for gunning is hunting (why not a hunter?).
“The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, [s]he must cultivate patience; [s]he may have to work many covers to bring down one partridge." (69)
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