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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Another Tommy tale: Once when he and I and Papa and Shelley were hunting together, Tommy brought along a setter named Chiefie, which had a fine nose and held firmly still on a point but also had a bad habit of jumping into the air after birds when they were flushed. He never caught one that I know of, but he kept on doing this despite scoldings and castigation. On this day he found and pointed a covey in a patch of live oak brush and was backed up by Shelley’s dog. They held beautifully as we moved in with guns at the ready, then flushed the covey when given the word. The quail exploded and all four of us started shooting, but the bird Tommy chose was in midflock, and just as he fired, a leaping black head rose into line with the bird and the shotgun’s pellets.
Without even a yelp, Chiefie fell limp to the ground. Shelley was the closest hunter and went over to look at the dog and feel various spots on its skull and throat.
He shook his head and said, “Gone!”
Tommy came up and did his own examining and concurred. He said, “Nita’s going to kill me. He was her favorite one of my dogs.”
We put the corpse into our nearby car and kept on hunting with Shelley’s pooch and another dog, a spare, released from its box in the car’s trunk. We found more coveys and did well with them, but there was not great joy among us.
Two or three hours later the dogs led us back near the area of the accident and found some scattered single birds and pairs. One of us shot, and a muffled frantic barking came from the car, where Chiefie was springing up and down and clawing at the window glass, eager to be back out in the action. When set free, he ran in circles with joy, blood-flecked as he was, and hunted avidly for the rest of the day and the rest of his life. But Uncle Tommy told me later that Chiefie never again jumped up at a covey rise.
Shelley’s Remington pump was given to me by Aunt Sally after he died, in 1962, and I have used it for my own infrequent hunting ever since. The shotgun I had grown up with, an inexpensive double-barreled 20-gauge Springfield that had been a present on my twelfth Christmas, I gave to my nephew Robert Wynne, who was having trouble with rabbits in his vineyard in New Zealand.
In fact, I have now given away most of the guns on this list to younger relatives and friends, retaining only three or four for practical or sentimental reasons. These survivors include Shelley’s pump, despite the fact that I still like doubles best and for a good many years hoped I would end up with a really nice one—not a costly “bespoke” English Purdey or Holland and Holland, built to order after elaborate personal measurings and test firings, but possibly an old but sound Parker, Ithaca, Fox, or L. C. Smith.
However, doubles, old or new, grew steadily more pricey during an era when marriage and fatherhood and other expenses were chewing up my spending money. I do, however, still regret not buying a premium 16-gauge Winchester Model 21 with two sets of barrels, which a broke Air Force pilot once offered to me for $350. Regret it, even though at this point I’m not physically up to any more hunting at all.
| Rifles |
WINCHESTER MODEL 06 PUMP .22 CALIBER
A holdover from childhood, given to me on my tenth birthday. This model, when chambered only for .22 shorts, the least powerful cartridges in that caliber, was the standard at shooting galleries and carnival booths in those times, but a good many, like this one, were made for kids, short-stocked and chambered to accept all three types of .22 cartridges—shorts, longs, and long rifles. I have cherished it all my life, and after World War II, I went to a bit of trouble carving an adult-size cherrywood stock and forearm for it, a pretty good job except for some bobbles in the checkering.
Back then youngsters were mainly introduced to firearms much earlier in life than I think most are today. You went from a BB air gun to a .22 more or less routinely, though a good bit of supervision was usually exercised. When he gave me this little rifle, my father went out with me to try it on some targets and tin cans, and he told me, “You must never, never point this gun at any person!” And I said, “No, Papa, I won’t.”
But two or three weeks later I was lying on my bed by a window, cherishing and polishing my new acquisition, when a particular neighborhood enemy of mine came walking down a driveway next door. The rifle was not loaded, and I swung it to fix the sights on his head as he moved along, at which moment Papa walked into the room.
I didn’t get the little .22 back for months, and even then it was with stern restrictions that involved getting permission to even touch it where it reposed in my parents’ closet. Three or four years later, however, an ingenious neighbor boy evolved a method of replacing lead .22 bullets with candle wax, which we would then shoot at each other, and I don’t remember Papa’s objecting to this. Or maybe he didn’t know about it. At any rate, since that wax-bullet phase, I have remained aware of his instructions all my life and have never pointed a firearm purposely at any human being except during the Pacific war.
This rifle, which has reaped a large harvest of rabbits and squirrels and varmints through the years, has also figured in certain small human dramas, a couple of which may be worth setting down here.
In the seventies on our country property, a two-story east addition to our house was going up, and during one summer I was being helped in its construction by Jane’s nephew Charlie Cole, from Connecticut, and a couple of friends’ sons, Suter Dubose and Jim McBride, of Fort Worth. Charlie and Suter were alone in the living room one day after lunch. Through my stupidity the little .22, loaded but without a shell in the chamber, was leaning in a corner, and Charlie, who knew nothing at all about guns, picked it up and aimed it at various points in the room, including Suter, while saying, “Pow! Pow!” to emulate shots. Then he pumped the slide handle and pulled the trigger, and the resulting explosion sent a small hunk of lead through the polished front drawer of a handsome vintage secretary that Jane prized.
At least, I reflected afterward, it hadn’t been Suter . . .
That hole is still with us, at Jane’s insistence, as a part of family lore.
I seem, however, to have only partly learned what I should have learned about modern youngsters and guns. Not long after that incident, when the addition had been framed and roofed but not finished inside and my helpers were back at their desks in school, we had a weekend visit from Bob and Laura Wilson, of Dallas, with two of their young sons, who are both now well-known Hollywood actors. We adults were sitting in lawn chairs on the porch while the small Wilsons, eight or nine years old, were loudly exploring their environs and the unfinished construction.
Before they came I had put the little rifle, still loaded for possible snakes and varmints but with an empty chamber, athwart the ceiling beams of what was to be our master bedroom, nearly nine feet above the floor. I was certain this would keep it out of the small Wilsons’ reach, but I was dead wrong. It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes before one of the little devils raced past us on the porch, brandishing the rifle and emitting cowboy yells. He was furious when I chased him down and grabbed it away from him.
I still have the old .22, but it stays empty these days, with its ammunition stowed elsewhere.
REMINGTON MODEL 660 BOLT-ACTION, .243 WINCHESTER CALIBER
During a long spell of years I put much work and energy into this country place where Jane and I still live, developing it as a stock farm. Its primary livestock were Angus or crossbred cattle, but we also needed goats to eat brush and keep it from reinfesting cleared land. At one time, in addition to a few pet Nubians kept in pens near our house, we had a herd of ninety or more Spanish, or common, goats, which roamed widely.
Small kid goats are easy meat for almost all wild carnivores and need to be guarded against predation. But the schedule of goat reproduction usually means that kids are nearly all born at about the same time, so with care you can pen them for protection until they’re larger and more agile, letting the nannies in from time to time to give the little ones milk and attention.
I guess I’d better put most of this into the past tense, since we no longer have any goats or the troubles associated with them. But those troubles are still fresh in my mind.
Mature goats and half-grown kids had only two main enemies in our region, and these were dogs and coyotes. The latter killed only what they could eat and were so smart and cautious that after you had shot one or two of them they either moved elsewhere or stopped bothering your flock.
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