"You're hunting together; you need to know where everyone is," said Lawrence G. Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
Jeff Hart, an Austin lawyer who hunts quail in Texas, said: "If you pull the trigger, you're responsible for it, no matter what.... In hunting, the shooter is responsible for knowing where the shot is going. That's the bottom line."
Cheney -- known for having testy relations with the media -- on Monday came under criticism from Democrats and Republicans who said the White House should have disclosed the incident immediately.
"It's news, and it reflects an attitude in this White House of holding back information, of being too clever by half and being secretive," columnist Robert Novak said on Fox News.
"On the face of it, this looks like something the administration felt the public had no right to know," Joe Lockhart, who was President Clinton's press secretary, said in an interview. "I don't think there's going to be a bunch of people sitting around saying: 'I wonder why they waited to tell us.' But what they will be saying is: 'I wonder what else they're not telling us.' "
Whittington, a prominent Austin lawyer, and the vice president arrived for a weekend hunting trip Friday night at the 50,000-acre Armstrong Ranch, a well-known retreat for wealthy Texas Republicans 95 miles southwest of Corpus Christi.
The party of 11 hunters set out in two trucks Saturday morning, driving around the mesquite-dotted property and shooting quail until about 12:30 p.m., said Anne Armstrong, co-owner of the ranch. Then they broke for a lunch of antelope, jicama salad and camp bread, washed down with Dr. Pepper.
After lunch, the group split up. Cheney, Whittington and Pamela Pitzer Willeford, U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, went with two of Armstrong's daughters and pursued quail for several more hours. It was at dusk that Whittington shot a bird and went to retrieve it, taking him behind the vice president.
The medical team that travels with Cheney immediately began ministering to Whittington, who was bleeding profusely from wounds to his face, neck and chest, witnesses said. They packed Whittington into Cheney's ambulance and drove him to a hospital.
The injuries did not appear to be life-threatening, Armstrong said, because the ambulance paused on the road for several minutes to allow Whittington's wife to join them.
