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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The shooting there was constant and so, quite soon, were the shouts of “Hup! Hup! Over here, Hup!” because the shot birds that fell into the tangled wheat or the brush bordering the field were very hard for human eyes to discern. But every shooter “limited out” and lost not a bird, all because of the nose, skill, and eagerness of a dog that was not supposed to be a retriever at all.
However, Hup was out of dog-show stock (his sire had been a champion), with systemic defects engendered by inbreeding. He lasted only to the age of six before collapsing miserably with a combination of dysplasia, pancreatitis, and constant diarrhea, so that I had to have the vet “put him to sleep,” as the euphemism has it.
Not long before Hup broke down, however, I had bred him to a far less patrician Old En-glish bitch belonging to a local lady and later had given the breeding fee—my choice among the resulting pups—to a friend. When the friend heard that I had lost Hup, he insisted that I take the pup back, and this was Hodge.
Hodge was much like his sire in a number of ways, though not as anxious to please or as amenable to training. He too was a header, but a fierce and noisy one that could panic livestock and wreck a drive. So I had to put him on a leash or leave him at the house when engaging in such work. And he had Hup’s good nose and loved retrieving shot birds but often dashed out when doves, say, were flying in and scared them out of range. When I did shoot one, he would find it and bring it in but would usually chomp on it all the way, so that what he presented me with was a gory bunch of feathers.
For these reasons I seldom took him along when I was hunting with friends, but he gentled a bit with time and we came to be quite close, as men and their dogs usually do. With his plebeian genes, he lasted thirteen years, and during the last three or four of them, having been bawled out and punished time and again for that chomping, he gave it up, but without developing a soft mouth. Instead of bringing a downed bird back to me, he would go out and stand with his nose pointing down at it, finding every one, and would wait for me to limp out on arthritic legs to pick it up. Once, when a dove was only winged and fluttered a few yards farther out each time Hodge moved up and stood over it again, he finally put his paw on it, holding it in place till I came.
I SEEM TO HAVE strayed a bit far from guns in these observations, but so be it. Although firearms and working dogs and hunting and so on are increasingly old-fashioned in a time when a heavily urban public is exhilarated through electronics and seeks “virtual” experience, I myself remain pretty much of an unrepentant anachronism. But there are still a good many of us around, and I hope this piece will speak to such folks.
Therefore, so long, all you fellow anachronisms.
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.
Not ever having been much of a duck hunter, I have only rarely fired this weapon, though it’s still in good shape, and at times during my family’s latter-day rural life in relative isolation, it has been a comfort to own, leaning in a closet corner and loaded with double-ought buckshot shells against the possibility of evil intruders. It would just about blow a man in half. And it has occasionally been handy against predators, as I will note farther along.
REMINGTON MODEL 870 PUMP, 20-GAUGE
My uncle-by-marriage Shelley Tarkington, an Aggie and a First World War aviator, then a cotton broker till the 1929 crash, and finally the longtime postmaster in Cuero, was a passionately active hunter and bird-dog man who like most of his contemporaries had always used a 12-gauge gun. But as he aged and developed heart problems, his doctor persuaded him to change to a lighter piece, so he bought this one, which had interchangeable choke tubes that could be attached to its muzzle and was thus adaptable to several sorts of hunting. He was an even better shot than Uncle Tommy. I remember an occasion late in Shelley’s life when he and I went out after doves that were watering in the evenings at a cattle pond, a “tank.” He had been warned against excessive exercise, so he took shots only at incoming birds, which, if hit, would fall close by. And with this gun he hardly missed a one, dropping them within a few feet of where he stood, so that he reached the legal limit of fifteen while I was still trying to kill my seventh or eighth bird.
To digress a bit, as seems to be getting usual in this document, Uncle Tommy also had to adjust his weaponry when older, though he didn’t last nearly as long as Shelley did. One evening when he was in his late thirties or early forties, he was driving along a country road with his left elbow poking out of the car’s open window. A large truck going in the opposite direction swerved as it passed (or maybe Tommy swerved—he sometimes drank a bit much) and sideswiped the car, shearing his arm off not far below the shoulder. After it had healed to a stub, he refused to give up hunting and got a beautiful light 28-gauge double that he could handle with only his remaining arm, shooting nearly as well as he had with a 12-gauge and two arms.
Somehow, appropriately, when he died of a massive heart attack at, I think, 47, it followed a strenuous afternoon spent following his dogs after quail.
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