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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Dogs, though, were neither as bright nor as frugal in their depredations. Mainly these canines were referred to in rural regions as “wild” dogs so that dealing with them as they needed to be dealt with would not seem to involve killing people’s pets, as it often did. For domestic dogs in the country, allowed to run free at night after perhaps playing with a family’s children all day, would often gang up and traverse the landscape, slaughtering poultry, goats, sheep, and even small calves whose cow mothers were not pretty tough. All of this just for fun, not food. And when you had heard those dogs barking and baying and snarling at midnight, and you’d gone up a hill in the morning to find seven or eight or more goats dead, or dying with their guts hanging out, you tended to come back down with a much less sentimental view of dogs as a species, despite the excellent, controlled ones you had at home.
That was why I bought this flat-shooting .243 and put a scope sight on it. With the old Model 97 12-gauge and its buckshot, the rifle saw good use on occasion, which I will not detail here except to note that it involved a bit of vengeful mayhem.
The .243 was also an efficient weapon for medium-large game, and when we were all living here as a family, I used it to harvest some venison each year, even though I’ve never been a dedicated deer hunter and in fact didn’t much like to kill them.
| Miscellaneous |
SAVAGE OVER-AND-UNDER COMBINATION .22 RIFLE AND .410 SHOTGUN
A piece of junk really, with no serial number and the two barrels poorly aligned so that their loads hit in different places. I bought this one for Jane before our family moved down to our present property southwest of Dallas and Fort Worth. We were living then on a rented piece of land just outside the second city, with a honky-tonk stretch of highway nearby, and I was often away. I told Jane, “If you hear anybody outside at night, just go out on the porch and shoot the shotgun barrel in the air and yell, ‘I know you’re there!’”
But she hates guns and I doubt she ever did this.
I didn’t give up trying to interest her, however, not for a while. In the late sixties, down at our own country place with its then-minimal living quarters, she and I were sitting in the main room one day when I brought out this ugly but very simple weapon to try once more to teach her how it worked.
“You get that?” I asked after putting a .22 cartridge into its chamber and snapping the barrels down into position. She said yes, and I handed it to her. “Now unload it,” I told her.
I did have the sense to give it to her pointed upward. She took it, pulled the hammer back, yanked the trigger, and shot a hole in the ceiling that is still there, unfilled for the same reason the hole in her heirloom secretary remains open. Family history.
That was about the end of my efforts to make Jane like guns.
SHERIDAN 5 MM PELLET AIR RIFLE
In the late sixties or early seventies, when we still had horses here that ate oats and scattered a lot of them around, we attracted a large infestation of English sparrows, a species that had burgeoned in its homeland when horses were primary in farming, commerce, and travel. Our line of old, large live oaks in front of the house had not yet been devastated by the blight that would kill them all a few years later, and those trees became a primary nesting and roosting area for the small invaders, which chased away more-desirable birds and kept up an incessant chatter and a rain of droppings. I asked an ornithological acquaintance what to do about this. He said that unfortunately the only way he knew to control them was to kill as many as possible, which sooner or later would cause the survivors to go somewhere else. So on the advice of a gun-wise friend, I bought this compact and accurate rifle and had it equipped with a peep sight.
The gun was not a repeater and had to be pumped up after each shot to restore air pressure, but it worked extremely well. I would sit in a lawn chair beneath one of the oaks with my Australian heeler Blue beside me, and whenever a sparrow exposed itself in the foliage, I would raise the pellet rifle and shoot. My eyesight was much better back then than it is now, so with the peep sight I only occasionally missed. As each victim fell to the ground, Blue would dash over and eat it, never seeming to get sick from the feathers.
With a hunting dog this would have been a very poor procedure, for those dogs are supposed to deliver downed quarry intact to the shooter. But Blue was purely a herder, not a hunter, and I fear we both came to enjoy the game, deadly as it was for the sparrows. It lasted for only a few weeks, though, before my ornithological friend was proved right and every single English sparrow on the place departed for realms unknown.
The mention of Blue’s unsporting consumption of sparrows brings to mind a couple of shaggy Old English sheepdogs named Hup and Hodge, sire and son, that we owned in succession after Blue’s abrupt disappearance one night—killed by mistake and then guiltily hauled away, I came to believe, by spotlighting fur hunters who simply fired at the glowing eyes of creatures attracted by their rabbit calls, for fox and coyote and bobcat pelts were at a premium just then.
Old English Hup was given to us as a pup by a friend after we lost Blue and was a delightful dog, quick to learn and eager to please. When accompanying us on long walks through pastures and cedar brush he was wont to disappear at times, following various scents, but always came back without having gotten into mischief.
His breed are headers rather than heelers, and a header’s instinct is to get on the far side of livestock being worked and bring them back toward its master. Before I figured this out, it led to some comical situations when I was trying to drive cows or goats or a neighbor’s trespassing hogs into a corral or through a gate and Hup would race out in front of them and try to drive them back.
But, unexpectedly for a herding dog, he had a good nose and turned out to be an excellent and dedicated retriever of the doves, quail, and ducks I was still hunting at that time. He was “soft-mouthed” and brought shot birds back to drop them at my feet in perfect shape.
One fall I had an eight- or ten-acre field of ripe wheat that I hadn’t been able to get harvested, so that by October it was a disorderly mess full of crisscrossed grain-bearing stalks. But it was also a magnet for doves, which came there in hundreds, day after day. This was too much of a bonanza for one lone occasional sportsman, so I called a city friend, who brought six or seven other friends down to our place. One of these I had been close to since our first grade in school. He was not a happy hunter, maybe because of wartime experiences, so he and I stayed talking on high ground from which we could watch the melee in the field below.
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 English 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.
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