Game Over 
Great Guns
I was ten years old when I got my first rifle, a Winchester Model 06 pump .22. Since then, I’ve owned countless pistols, shotguns, and other firearms. And whether used for hunting or gathering dust, each one tells a story.
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During my brief combat time in the Pacific, I carried this .45, as well as an issue .30-caliber carbine, but I remember only once when I used the pistol out there. During our first night on the beach at Saipan, in June 1944, a very dark night, individual Japanese infiltrators seemed to be everywhere, dropping grenades into foxholes, knifing people, or otherwise playing such merry hell that we were all on edge. At one point, in the dimness I saw a form skulking along in the salt shallows just off the beach, challenged it and received no reply, and cut loose with the .45. What I shot holes in turned out to be not a Japanese soldier but a small metal barrel propelled bobbingly by a light breeze, a discovery that made me feel foolish indeed. But it was that kind of night, and several lost or blundering Americans got killed or wounded by nervous fellow countrymen.
COLT FRONTIER SCOUT .22-CALIBER SINGLE-ACTION REVOLVER
This one had the shape and longish barrel of the old gunfighters’ heavier weapon, but it disappeared long ago, either stolen or, more likely, hidden by me in some secret niche that is now secret from myself also. I had bought it at the instigation of a ranching friend, Tommy Harrison, a rough-hewn ruralist and backward looker. I liked it very much—simple, safe, comfortable in the hand, and extremely accurate.
COLT .357 MAGNUM REVOLVER
I bought this pistol (why?) in the late sixties but fell out of love with it quite soon, for it was horridly loud and kicked like a mule. So I traded it in on the next item below.
SMITH & WESSON .38-CALIBER REVOLVER, MODEL 36 (SHORT-BARRELED CHIEFS SPECIAL)
Acquired (again why?) in the swap mentioned above. I used this cylinder .38 very little except for occasional practice shooting and maybe a rattlesnake or two.
BROWNING .25-CALIBER SEMIAUTOMATIC
In 1964 I was invited along on a canoe float down the Conchos River in northern Mexico by the trip’s organizer, Rodman Saville, of Houston. No one seemed to know much about that river and there were no decent maps, nor any records we could find of previous voyages on it, but we headed out. Six of us put our three canoes and our gear and ourselves onto a freight train at Ojinaga, where the Conchos flows into the Rio Grande, and unloaded about a hundred miles upstream at a river town called Falomir. And from Falomir we ran downstream for a few days through deserts and canyons to Ojinaga again.
Heading into any remote part of Mexico was and still is a bit iffy in terms of what sorts of human beings one might encounter, so Rodman and I each brought along one of these tiny Brownings, an easily concealed if, in Mexico, illegal means of self-defense. Both of us were military veterans and knew that such miniature armament would not stop any villains in their tracks unless they were hit in the head. But the things could be hidden in our smallest pockets and could if produced, we hoped, cause said villains to think twice before initiating violence.
As it turned out, we got along fine with the sparse and primitive population along the river’s shores, in part because my Spanish was still fairly decent from living in Spain in the fifties. This was true at least until we reached the always restless and, yes, dangerous zone near the Rio Grande, where smiles and waved hands became less prevalent than scowls as six unshaven, trip-soiled gringos paddled past in their chalupas.
There was no actual trouble, though I think we once came close to it in a canyon near the journey’s end, where three unprepossessing characters in a wooden skiff paddled out to intercept us. They had a Winchester lever-action deer rifle propped against the boat’s gunwale. Not one was smiling, and the mustachioed largest one of them, sitting beside the rifle, asked what we were doing there. I told him. He was briefly silent, then said they were fishing and needed bait, and I told him that we had none. He studied us for a time, but if he had any action in mind, he apparently decided there were too many of us. In silence he signaled the others to paddle back toward shore, and with relief we watched them go.
Later, Rodman and I compared notes, and neither of us had had his little Browning where it could be reached in a hurry. So much for self-defense.
This diminutive weapon has been called “the lady’s pistol,” and I’m sure it has been utilized in a few serious marital scraps and murders, perhaps in the nickel-plated, pearl-handled version.
RUGER .22-CALIBER SEMIAUTOMATIC, MARK II
I BOUGHT THIS ONE in the eighties when Jane and I were driving to Key West each spring to fish with her brother John Cole, who was living there with his wife, Jean. We had our own skiff that I had fixed up for such fishing and would tow it down there on its trailer. The Lower Keys were not as heavily frequented at that time as they would be within only a few years, and we were often alone among the many mangrove islets of the “backcountry” on the Gulf side, where there was much beauty and good fishing but also where dubious-looking Cubans or uncongenial poor-white Conch types sometimes turned up in boats. We never had any bad experiences there except once when our pickup was ransacked at an isolated boat ramp, but I believe in being prepared, and this pistol, made of stainless steel, was my instrument of preparedness.
It was a beauty, but I have a sometimes ill-advised habit of tinkering with new acquisitions, and I tinkered a bit too much with this one. It was shooting consistently lower than the points at which I aimed it, so I took a file and worked the front sight down to rectify this. I filed it a bit overmuch, though, and afterward the pistol shot too high. I became fully aware of this one weekend when we had a group of friends down here at our country place, with several children among them. Our creek was running nicely, so much of the activity was down by its little waterfall and the pool below. However, two separate good-sized rattlesnakes liked it there too. I don’t usually kill them unless they are where people are, but these most certainly were. I dispatched the first one with a stick, then brought this .22 from the pickup, whereupon the kids found another rattler far back under some bushes. I crouched down and started shooting at its head but kept missing before I remembered the filed-down sight. One boy, the grandson of an old friend, then seven or eight years old, was right behind me as I fired, and with every shot he would yell, “Kill him! Kill him!” until I finally did.
I had intended to replace that front sight, but as with many other things these days, I never got around to it.
Shotguns
WINCHESTER MODEL 97 PUMP (SLIDE-ACTION), 12-GAUGE
THE OTHER ANTIQUE from Cuero, older I think than Grandpa’s little .32 semiautomatic. “Model 97” means the type was first made in 1897, I’m sure, and this must have been an early specimen. According to the story Papa told me, in the days before there were many game laws, the gun had first belonged to a market duck hunter. Those people were not sportsmen but ambushed their quarry on the water, preferably when they were flocked up and a single cartridge could harvest a good number of dead birds to sell. He in turn, probably after game laws got stiffer, sold or traded it to my father’s brother Will, who died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918, after which I assume it passed to Papa, though at some point it was used by Will and Papa’s younger brother, Tommy. Tommy was the most avid hunter in the family, an excellent shot who also had great skill in blowing off the ends of shotgun barrels when they had been carelessly poked into dirt or mud. And he did this to the Model 97.
Parenthetically though without parentheses, I will note that along the way I inherited two other shotguns that Uncle Tommy had shortened in this fashion, both with double barrels of old-fashioned laminated Damascus steel, a handsome metal but intended for black-powder shells and too tender for safe use with modern smokeless ammunition, which Tommy may well have tried to fire in them. One of these Damascus doubles was a Baker 16-gauge with a single trigger, automatic extractors, and handsome woodwork, a real old beauty. For some odd reason, this Baker, which I never fired, called to my mind the antiquated English muzzle loader used by Caroline Gordon’s title figure in her wonderful Aleck Maury, Sportsman, who is modeled on her own father.
At any rate, after Uncle Tommy had thus reduced the old Model 97, Papa—I think it was he—had a new thirty-inch, full-choke, proof-steel barrel put on it, and this was the only shotgun he owned or fired for the rest of his less and less active hunting career. He used it even on quail, whose explosive flight when flushed from the grass is best dealt with by shorter barrels and more-open chokes that give the small pellets required in that hunting a much wider pattern. But he was still a good shot and didn’t do badly with it.
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