Glibertarians.com 2018 Archive

Author: Animal

  • A History of The Six-gun, Part Two

    A History of The Six-gun, Part Two

    Colt Modernizes – Cap and Ball Colts

    The Walker Colt

    A well-known fan of the Walker.

    In 1846, Sam Colt found a young man from Texas knocking at his door.  That young man, Captain Samuel Walker, was on a mission; he wanted Sam Colt to return to the business of making revolvers.

    At this time Colonel Colt was engaged, as noted in Part 1, in manufacturing underwater electrical cable, tinfoil and marine mines.  Captain Walker wanted revolvers for the new-born Republic of Texas, but he didn’t want a rebirth of the .36 caliber Paterson.  He wanted a big, heavy, powerful revolver; a revolver for horsemen.  He wanted a dragoon pistol.

    Sam Colt was apparently interested, because he sat down to create Captain Walker’s desires in steel.  The result of this process was the sidearm that first defined the form of the modern sixgun.  The 1847 Colt Walker held six loads rather than five, and the big cylinder, while described as a .44, was actually a .45, taking a .457 round or conical ball over as much as 60 grains of FFFG black powder.  The gun further had a hinged, attached rammer for reloading and a fixed trigger and trigger guard.  This was not only the first modern-form sixgun but also the first magnum revolver, as the big cylinder and the heavy .457 ball packed quite a wallop.

    A few years back I had the pleasure of firing a replica Walker.  It was an interesting piece to handle, but sure as hell not a quick-draw piece.  The Walker Colt is long, heavy and cumbersome, but it’s important to remember what the Walker was designed for; it is a dragoon pistol.  It was designed for horsemen, to be carried my mounted riflemen (dragoons.)  Some Walkers as well as the later dragoon models were adapted to be fitted with shoulder stocks but making the revolver a carbine presents the same problem that led to the demise of revolving rifles in general; the cylinder gap has a distinct tendency to vent hot gases and, if a gun is ill-timed, to spit the occasional lead shaving.  None of this is good for the shooter’s non-firing arm.

    The Colt Walker was effective but less than perfect.  Poor metallurgy in the early guns led to problems with ruptured cylinders, and the weak loading lever latch often led to the rammer dropping under recoil, jamming the gun up and preventing a fast follow-up shot.  In the end, this led to only 1,100 Walker revolvers being built.  These problems did, however, led to the next step in Colt sixgun development only a year after the advent of the Walker.

    The Dragoons

    Unknown Union soldier with a brace of Dragoons.

    A martial pistol must be powerful, reliable and tough; the Walker was powerful, but fell a bit short on the other two aspects.  So, what started with the Walker revolver led to several developments and refinements in the basic dragoon pistol.  There were four primary variants of the Dragoon revolvers:

    • The First Model Dragoon, made from 1848 to 1850, with oval cylinder stops, a square-backed trigger guard, and no wheel on the hammer where it rode on the mainspring.
    • The Second Model Dragoon, made from 1850 to 1851, with rectangular cylinder stops and a square-backed trigger guard. The first few hundred Second Models had the old V-type mainspring and no wheel on the hammer; later guns had the flat mainspring that would persist in Colt revolvers for many decades, along with a wheel on the hammer where it rode on the mainspring.
    • The Third Model Dragoon, made from 1851 to 1860, with rectangular cylinder stops and a rounded trigger guard. Colt played around with the Third Model more than the others, producing some with folding leaf sights on the barrel, cuts for shoulder stocks, and so on.
    • The 1848 Baby Dragoon, a small .31 caliber pocket revolver. This was later refined into the 1849 Pocket Revolver, which was popular among gold-seekers, gamblers and outlaws as a hideaway gun.

    The various Dragoon pistols were popular but even the Third Model still weighed in at a tad over four pounds.  There was obviously a market for a lighter, handier gun, more along the weight of the old Paterson guns but more modern and reliable.  That led to the development of an icon among cap-and-ball sixguns, the Colt Navy.

    The Colt Navy Revolvers

    My first sixgun was a replica of the 1851 Navy Colt, which is widely regarded as the best-handling sixgun made.  I see little reason to doubt that assessment based on my own experience.  My Navy had the standard 7 ½” barrel and a brass frame.  Back in my youth in Allamakee County I did a fair amount of fast-draw and reflex shooting practice, drawing and firing from an old drop belt from which the cartridge loops had been removed and a Mexican loop holster.  That Colt was excellent for such things, smooth, light and slick as a snake.  I shot it with .380 round lead balls and 30 grains of FFFG in paper cartridges I made myself.  I got so I could draw and place six rounds in a regular paper plate at 15 yards very quickly, and with the paper cartridges and a brass capper could reload and recap efficiently, usually having the old gun back in action in about a minute.  I carried the capper on a string around my neck, paper cartridges in an old tobacco tin and generally toted the old Navy around with me on many of my adventures in woods and fields.

    Colt Navy.

    There was a down side that resulted in my eventually discarding that old sixgun, and that was the brass frame.  With every shot that steel cylinder hammered back into that soft brass frame, eventually deforming the frame to the point where I reckoned the old piece unsafe to shoot.  I had a couple of friends who were in a local theater group, so I seated some balls in the empty cylinder, hammered a few balls into the barrel and removed the nipples to render the gun useless, then gave it to them as a prop gun.  I would like to have another of these guns, but when the day comes for me to find another cap and ball gun, it will be a steel frame version.  Brass frame replicas are still common on the gun market as flies in a barn, but I can’t recommend them for the reasons described above.

    Back in the day the Navy Colts were very popular.  The well-equipped cowpoke, lawman or gun twist frequently carried a brace of them in saddle holsters in addition to his belt gun; in the famous Charles Portis book True Grit, in that renowned final charge, it was with a brace of Navy Colts from saddle holsters that Marshal Cogburn engaged the four bad men, not the SAA Colt and ‘92 Winchester wielded by John Wayne in the movie.

    Ten years after the first Navy Colts were made, the Colt works brought out the ultimate Navy, that being the streamlined 1861 Navy, also in .36 caliber, with an improved “creeping” loading lever and the added loading clearance introduced in the .44 Army Colt of 1860.  There was also a miniature variant, the 1861 Pocket Navy, later refined into the 1862 Pocket Police, both small-framed .31 caliber revolvers.

    The Root Sidehammer

    Colt Root Sidehammer Patent Drawing

    The Root Side-hammer Colt, designed by Colt engineer Elisha K. Root, was in some ways a better design than the traditional versions; its solid frame was stouter, and the rear sight was on the frame rather than on the hammer nose.  The Root revolver, introduced in 1855, was popular among officers on both sides in the Civil War, but it was a real pipsqueak, manufactured only in .28 and .32 calibers

    The 1860 Army Colt

    What many consider the ultimate expression of the Colt cap and ball revolver was introduced in 1860, just in time for the Civil War or, as Mrs. Animal calls it, the War of the Northern Aggression.

    In many ways the 1860 Army combined the best of both worlds.  It was a much lighter and handier arm than the Dragoon pistols, and with it’s .44 caliber loads packed more punch than the Navy guns.  It was a fine, well-crafted, well-balanced piece, handicapped only by it’s open-topped frame and the odd placement of rear sight on the hammer nose.  This was perhaps the ultimate development of the Colt cap-and-ball revolver.  Its grip shape was so admirably suited to being fired accurately one-handed, even from horseback, carried over to the famous Colt Single Action Army and remains in use on the vast majority of single-action sixguns made today.  The use of a rebated cylinder allowed for the use of the same size frame as the Navy revolvers frame and kept the gun’s weight to about two and a half pounds.

    The Colt 1860 Army.

    As with the Walker and Navy revolvers, it has been my pleasure to handle a few Army Colts, most replicas but notably one original, although we didn’t fire the original.  The Army Colt is a pleasure to handle, heavy by modern standards but the big sixgun points naturally, barrel rise under recoil is controllable, and the rotation of the curved grip in the hand brings the hammer spur nicely under the thumb, allowing for quick follow-up shots.  The .44 round ball or conical bullet in front of 40 grains of FFFG packs a hearty punch.  A few shooting sessions with one will bring home exactly why this was probably the most desired martial sidearm of its era.

    And the demand for martial sidearms was about to explode.

    And Then This Happened

    Colt revolvers, especially the 1860 Army but also the Dragoon and Navy types, were soon in great demand as the War Between the States broke out.  Sam Colt, having foreseen the great increase in demand, had expanded the factory and, when the southern states began to secede, sold at least 2,000 revolvers to Confederate military buyers, an act which nearly killed the company when the war was over.  But what remains inarguable is the reason that the Colt revolvers were in demand by both Union and Confederate armies; they were tough, powerful, reliable sidearms, the state of the art for their day.

    Sam Colt passed away in January of 1862, killed of all things by complications of gout.  The appellation of Colonel was real, Sam Colt having received a commission from the state of Connecticut as commander of the 1st Regiment Colts Revolving Rifles of Connecticut.  But that unit never took the field, and Colonel Colt was soon released from service.  But the erstwhile Colonel Colt’s company was building thousands and thousands of Army revolvers and a variety of guns for the civilian market, they didn’t lack for competition.  Plenty of people were getting in on the sixgun action, including America’s oldest surviving gunmaker, Remington, as well as plenty of others.  We’ll talk about them in Part 3.  Meanwhile, bigger things were afoot; about this time two men were set to change the world of sixguns forever.  Those two men were Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, and they had an idea and a patent.  But that’s a story for Part 4!

  • A History of The Six-gun, Part One

    Revolvers B.C.

    In the history of sixguns, there are two periods of time to be considered:  Before Sam Colt, and after Sam Colt.  The Before Colt (B.C.) era was the time of the flintlock, and a surprising number of innovative repeating guns were made during this time, mostly custom jobs and one-offs.  But there is one B.C. revolver that stands out, and that is the Collier.

    The Collier Revolver.

    Elisha Collier was a Boston inventor, and his revolver was unique in one respect among flintlock repeating guns; it used a cylinder separate from the barrel to carry the arm’s multiple charges, rather than the pepperbox-styled arrangements that were found prior to his time.  Collier’s first flintlock revolvers around 1814 and production continued up to about 1824, all guns being made by John Evans & Sons of London.  Estimates of numbers produced vary but are almost certainly under 500, in both handgun and long gun versions.

    The Collier revolver was a fine piece for its day.  It was innovative, well-made, well appointed and, given the shortcomings of its flintlock ignition system, reliable.  One of Collier’s innovations was an automated priming mechanism in the flintlock’s frizzen, that made possible repeated shots without re-priming the pan.  But the limitations of the flintlock remained; the guns, like all flintlocks, were vulnerable to wet and wind.  The advent of the percussion cap would change all that, but while Collier’s London manufacturer produced a few models using the newfangled percussion ignition system, for the most part Elisha Collier missed that boat.

    The real impact of the Collier revolver was not to come from Britain.  It came instead from a young cabin boy aboard the brig Corvo, who saw a Collier revolver on board ship and set to thinking about revolving repeaters.  That cabin boy’s name was Samuel Colt.

    The Advent of Colonel Colt

    Colonel Colt. He made all men equal.

    There’s a reason that the saying “God created men, Colonel Colt made them equal” was a truism in the old West.  The form of the modern wheelgun was in large part designed and defined by Sam Colt, and with the Colt revolver came the advent of the modern personal sidearm.

    The young Samuel Colt was an interesting character.  As a youth he was intrigued by gunpowder, electricity – he made one of, if not the first underwater electrically-fired explosive device – and manufacturing.  He’s known for pioneering revolver designs but also pioneered mass production and the use of interchangeable parts along with his contemporary Eli Whitney.  He also was among the first to dabble in such modern marketing techniques as celebrity endorsements, soliciting Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel II among others to make prominent use of his revolvers.  He used art liberally in advertising, paying substantial sums to have artists produce heroic scenes of the West featuring use of his revolvers in fighting outlaws and Indians.  A Renaissance Man he may not have been, but he was a brilliant inventor and marketer, and he changed the nature of sidearms forever.

    While the Collier revolver may have been the inspiration for Colonel Colt, he had the advantage of the new percussion cap ignition system.  After making several prototypes, including the famous hand-carved wooden model he produced while on board the Corvo, he arrived on the configuration that defines the sixgun to this day:  A solid frame and a revolving cylinder with stops to align each chamber in turn with the single barrel.

    European and American patents in hand, Colt obtained financing and set up shop in Paterson, New Jersey, calling his operation the Patent Arms Manufacturing company.

    The Paterson Colts

    Colt’s first revolver venture only ran for six years, from 1836 to 1842.  In that time the company produced 2,350 sidearms, 1,450 revolving rifles and carbines, and 460 revolving shotguns.

    The early Paterson revolvers were iconic, innovative and popular, but in hindsight weren’t terribly effective.  The lack of a trigger guard is noticeable, the guns having a fragile folding trigger that extended when the hammer was cocked.  The first models had to be partially disassembled to be reloaded.  But Colt finally achieved a measure of success with the .36 caliber Belt Model #5,

    The Texas Paterson.

    commonly known as the Texas Paterson.

    By modern standards the ergonomics of the Paterson revolvers are pretty bad.  The odd-shaped grip doesn’t suit people with large hands.  The guns were a little light on the barrel end unless you had one of the 9” versions, making them feel whippy in handling; but the long-barreled guns were not as quick to clear leather, putting the horse soldier or gunfighter at a disadvantage.  Even so, the gun pointed naturally and shot reasonably well.

    The Paterson was imperfect in other ways.  Guns made before 1839 were, as noted, difficult to reload, and all the Paterson guns only held five shots.

    Being a five-shooter rather than a six-shooter was a problem for one more reason than the one missing shot.  All Colt revolvers up to and including the famed Single Action Army had the same issue, namely that the only safe way to carry one was with the hammer down on an empty chamber.  This reduced the Paterson to a four-shot gun, and (at least, before 1839) one that couldn’t be quickly or easily recharged.

    Bear in mind that this was an era in which most sidearms were still front-stuffing single-shots, so the handicap wasn’t seen as being as dire as we might consider it today, in a time where many semi-auto sidearms carry enough ammo in a single magazine to lay low a small army of attackers.  Even so, the limitation often led to the conscientious pistolero carrying two or three revolvers on belt or saddle.

    A Paterson Colt rifle.

    The Patent Arms Manufacturing Company sold a number of sidearms to the US Army who issued them to troops fighting in the Second Seminole Wars.  Those troops favored the Paterson Colt’s capacity, but Army evaluators found the guns too finicky and unreliable in combat and so disallowed any further purchases.  Sam Colt did sell a couple hundred sidearms and a like number of revolving rifles to the Republic of Texas, who issued them to their new-found Navy, but when that Navy disbanded in 1843, the Paterson guns were issued to the Texas Rangers.  The Rangers liked the revolving guns, which gave them a much-needed firepower advantage over the Comanche Indians, with whom the Republic of Texas was then engaged in hostilities.

    It was in fact the use of Paterson revolvers by the Texans and their increasing popularity with the new waves of settlers crossing the prairies that set the stage for the next step in the development of Colonel Colt’s revolvers.  While the Paterson Colt was arguably a failure both in martial and commercial sales, and while the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company went under after only six years, a seed had been planted.

    That seed sprang forth in 1846, when General Zachary Taylor send a young Army Captain, Samuel Walker, to Connecticut, where Sam Colt was engaged in manufacturing underwater electrical cable, tinfoil and marine mines.  Captain Walker had one mission:  To convince Colonel Colt of the need for a revised revolver, one that would be more reliable, more rugged and more powerful than the .28 and .36 caliber Patersons.  That mission by Captain Walker would bear significant fruit…

    …But that’s a tale for Part 2.

  • Knives You Need for Outdoor Chores

    Cutlery!

    We’ve done a fair bit of talking about guns in these Friday sessions.  While we all love fine guns (well, most of us do) and the activities in which fine guns are used, there is always a need for fine cutlery as well.  If you hunt, then knives are important for a variety of things, especially after you’ve fired the final shot; that’s when the fun ends and the work begins and a good knife with a good edge will make that work go a lot more smoothly.

    But there are many more uses for a good knife, whether your outdoor activities include hunting, fishing, camping, hiking or just lounging around in the outdoors.  So, let’s talk about a variety of cutlery for a variety of purposes.  Qualifier:  This is about knives for hunting, fishing, camping and general outdoor choring; I won’t discuss fighting knives, throwing knives or any other such special-use stuff.  At least not in this article.

    Sheathe Knives

    Two words:  Full tang.

    Western W36

    My Grandpa had a great example of a handmade knife some years back.  A local guy who Grandpa had done some carpentry work for during the Depression had no cash but was handy with steel.  He had a bar of razor steel and offered to make Grandpa a knife out of that.  Grandpa agreed, and the result was a wonder, a full tang (meaning the steel of the blade extends fully into the full profile of the handle, with grip panels on either side) knife with walnut grips.  That knife would take an edge like… well, a razor, and would hold it.  I remember watching Grandpa hone it, wipe it on his old razor strop, then proceed to slice paper by dropping it on the blade.  Sadly, when Grandpa died that knife disappeared along with all his fishing gear and his old Fox double.

    About the time Grandpa left us, my folks gave me a Western sheath knife, the old W36 Bowie type blade.  That knife not only takes a good edge but (as I know from experience) will hold it through two deer or a cow elk, including not only field-dressing but skinning and quartering.  A good solid full-tang sheathe knife like that will do you through almost any outdoor choring you’re liable to run across.

    If you’re dealing with either small game or fish, there’s one sheath knife that really stands out; it’s flexible, holds an edge well, it’s lightweight, and it’s not even very expensive; that would be the fine old Rapala fillet knife.  Its fine, tapered blade is delicate enough to take thin fillets off small fish and to deal handily with rabbits, squirrels and birds.  With the 6” version you can easily field-dress a deer, so long as you have a hatchet or saw to cut sternum and pelvis.  But the Rapala isn’t really a big game knife; it’s with small game and fish that the Rapala shines.

    Some things to look for in a fixed blade sheath knife:  A full tang, a stout blade (it shouldn’t be thin or whippy, unless it’s a fillet knife, when a thin blade is needed) and a good hilt to keep your hand from sliding up onto the edge.

    Rapala Knife

    Folding Knives

    Two words:  Buck 110.

    Buck 110

    There are many folding hunters by many manufacturers (Schrade in particular makes a very good one that is a doppelganger of the Buck 110) but the Buck 110 Folding Hunter is the gold standard by which all such folding hunting knives are measured.  It has a fine stainless blade that will take and hold a good edge while literally (as Buck commercials used to show) being tough enough to survive being hammered through a nail.  I have one that I have carried since I was about sixteen; I’ve dressed deer, antelope and javelina with it, along with all manner of smaller critters.  It rode my belt through my Army service and saw duty there for everything from opening MRE packs to (closed) rapping on the crew doors of armored vehicles to get someone’s attention.

    Buck, Schrade, Case and a number of other manufacturers make good solid folding hunters.  I suppose there may be some off-brand blades that are of acceptable quality, but I have yet to see one.  I have a small 3” folding knife that carries the Winchester name and according to the blade was made in China (what the hell isn’t?) and it’s of pretty good quality.  I was given that knife as a gift back when Winchester was still Winchester; I can’t speak for the quality of any such knives now, if indeed such a thing is still available.

    Some things to look for in a folding knife:  A solid riveted hinge, a secure lock, and good brass or steel on each end of the knife.  A quick-opening feature can be handy but isn’t essential, but a good lock is – you don’t want the knife folding up on you when you’re elbow-deep in elk guts.

    Pocketknives

    Two words:  Swiss Army.

    Sometimes I think there are many variations on the Victorinox Swiss Army Knife as there are stars in the sky.  You can get a cheap little inch-and a half version with a tiny blade, a file and a toothpick, you can get a massive version with screwdrivers, a corkscrew and a magnifying glass, and everything in between.  One thing you can count on; if it says Victorinox on the knife, it will be a good buy.

    When I was a kid the Barlow was something of a standard among the farm kids, hicks, rednecks and roustabouts I grew up with.  They were good for whittling, cleaning fish and small game, or any of the other thousand and one tasks for which we needed a cutting instrument.  Those knives are now made by Schrade and are still a good handy pocket knife.

    Some things to look for in a pocket knife:  Light weight, portability, a good stainless blade (440 is the best) and a handle big enough to make for a good safe grip.  Multiple blades are handy but not essential.

    Oddballs and misfits

    I can’t summarize this in two words.

    Herter’s “Bowie.”

    Those of us old enough to remember the old Herter’s catalog (the real Herter’s, not the purveyors of junk that have somehow acquired the name now) will remember that old George Leonard Herter had some very distinct ideas about outdoor equipment, and knives were no exception.  I have one of what old George called the Herter’s Bowie knife, which isn’t at all like Jim Bowie’s classic design but instead looks more like a steak knife.  But looks aside, the old Herter’s sheath knife has a stout, thick stainless-steel blade of good quality steel that holds an edge well; its lack of a guard makes some caution in handling necessary but it’s a good solid outdoor knife.  Mine has been used to dress out few eastern whitetails back when I lived in Iowa, and always performed well.

    The Wyoming Knife is another oddball, this one a specialty device meant for one purpose:  Field-dressing and caping big game animals.  It’s a funny-looking thing.  While I’ve never used one, I have used knives with a back-hook meant for field dressing, and it’s handy to be able to quickly and smoothly unzip a deer, elk or antelope.  It makes for a nice clean process, or at least as clean as field-dressing can be.  Now that I think on it, I may have to try a Wyoming knife next season.

    And don’t overlook such multifunction tools as the famous Leatherman.  Plenty of military folks carried one when I was in back in the Cold War Army, Mrs. Animal among them.  While it’s not really a “knife,” they do have knife blades along with all the other various and sundry tools found in the device.  It’s a handy thing to have around and while I don’t carry one on my person as a rule, one does live in the tool box in my truck.

    Wyoming Knife

    And so…

    And, finally, some unsolicited advice.  For those who frequent gun shows or any other kind of outdoors trade venue, or even if you look in the glass cases in many gas stations and truck stops, you’ll see a wide variety of knives for sale at some incredibly low prices.  Believe me when I tell you, they aren’t worth even the few dollars they charge for them.  They might make decent paperweights, but as practical cutting instruments they aren’t much good.

    Most of them are made from Chinese, Pakistani or Indian steel that is unevenly tempered and full of cinders.  If you can manage to get one to take an edge, it won’t hold.  Don’t bother.  Pay some more, get a good quality knife from a reputable maker, and you’ll never regret it.

    There’s an exception:  If you know a knife is going to be abused, don’t spend a lot of money.  My Dad kept several cheap pocketknives in a drawer, rarely having paid more than a couple of bucks for them.  He used them for scraping paint, for prying, for digging, whatever his choring around the place required, and when one broke – they inevitably did – he would toss it in the creek, go in the house and grab another.  While there’s an exception for every rule, that’s the only one I can think of in this case.

    A knife is (or should be) a serious tool for serious business.  You don’t have to go broke buying one, but neither should you cut corners.  Pick carefully and you’ll have a good solid piece of cutlery that should last a lifetime.

  • Legend of the Fall (or, Now For Something Completely Different)

    You all know my preferences on firearms and so forth by now.  I have plenty more to say on that score, but just to change things up, I thought I’d share a tale or two from my younger years, when I was a little tad learning my way around life in Allamakee County, Iowa.

    To that end:  It might be interesting to poll parents on the subject of what sound they would most associate with memories of their children. Some parents might remember the sound of laughter, the plunk of piano keys, or the squeak of a bicycle chain.

    In such recollection about me, my parents would probably have said “thump.”

    If there were a title for the Northeast Iowa Falling Champion, I’d have won it hands down for quite a few years running. There are probably less than three bodies of water in the northeastern quarter of Iowa into which I haven’t fallen; if you can fall into, off of, on, or out of it, I’ve done it. A typical scene at my parent’s house in my childhood years may have read something like this:

    A typical Allamakee County foot bridge.

    ENTER: DAD, sitting in his chair on the front porch, reading a book.

    YOUNG ANIMAL enters from stage left, and stops in front of the door, water dripping from his hair and clothes.

    DAD: (Not looking up from the book) “Fall in the creek again?”

    YOUNG ANIMAL: “Uhh… Yeah….”

    DAD: “Don’t drip water on the carpet. Your towel is in the shed where it always is.”

    In spite of the repeated dunkings, often at times of year which made immersion in a spring-fed stream extremely uncomfortable, there was always the urge to attempt a crossing on a three-inch wide down tree covered with loose bark and wet from a cold rain. At times like that the conflict between ego and id approached the stage of a declared war:

    EGO: “Go ahead, you can walk across on that.”

    ID: “Are you kidding? You won’t make it five feet! Remember what happened last time? And the time before that?”

    EGO: “Don’t listen to that wimp! Cross on over, there’s bound to be grouse in that thicket on the other bank and now that it’s stopped snowing, they’ll be out feeding.”

    ID: “This isn’t a good idea!”

    SPLASH!!

    Northeast Iowa is full of wonderful climbing trees, but as a young boy I had less than the normal enthusiasm for them, probably due to the repeated impacts with the ground underneath. Several of my Mom’s gray hairs were directly related to my crashing, high-speed, gravity-assisted exits from large trees.

    I gave up hunting deer from tree stands in my early teens for this very reason. Mind you, this was in those innocent years before modern tree stands.

    I recently received a catalog from one of the nation’s largest outdoor suppliers and was amazed at the technology in today’s tree stands. It now seems that the properly equipped hunter has a tree stand made of titanium and nylon webbing, with a nicely padded seat and backrest, a comfortable safety harness, a tray for your lunch and a beverage holder. The modern tree stand weighs less than a typical sandwich; well, at least less than one of MY typical sandwiches. It also follows you out to the hunting area, scouts the area for fresh sign, aids in the location of a tree, climbs the tree by itself, and places convenient steps strapped harmlessly to the tree trunk.

    Our tree stands consisted of a piece of 2×6 nailed into the crotch of a tree at least 50 feet up, to make sure the deer wouldn’t see you. Safety belts? Safety belts were for sissies. We shinnied up the tree and used a piece of bailing twine to haul our shotgun or bow up after us. It was generally considered wise to have a shotgun or bow in the tree; not for the chance of a deer happening along, but rather because the weapon provided something to break your fall when the inevitable happened. Black-powder guns with large protruding hammer spurs and bows with razor-head arrows were preferred for this purpose.

    With typical teenage enthusiasm, a typical opening morning of Iowa’s December deer season would see me on stand three hours before sunrise, shivering in the sub-zero cold, waiting for legal shooting light. With the approximate speed of a two-toed sloth on Valium, the sun would creep up over the horizon and with the light, enough warmth that I would begin to feel almost comfortable in my insulated coveralls. With comfort came the normal drowsiness associated with a 15-year old operating on exactly 12 minutes of sleep. With the drowsiness, eventually, came sleep.

    Some memories stay with you, vividly, for years.

    Reminiscing about hunting from a tree stand always brings to mind a wonderful dream. In the dream, I was enjoying a remarkable, floating sensation. I was adrift among the clouds, floating weightlessly above the ground. I remember thinking, isn’t this neat!  I remember, though, something about a tree… What was I doing, before I fell asleep, that involved a tree?

    The memory at this point involves a vision of grains of snow among brown, dried oak and maple leaves, seen from very close up, for one reason: I generally awoke, facing downward, approximately six inches from impact. Not just any impact, either, but the sort of tooth jarring, bone-rattling IMPACT that loosens several vertebrae and has you seeing stars for several hours afterwards. It is a singularly unpleasant way to wake up, one that I don’t recommend.

    My most spectacular fall involved a .22 rifle, a cliff, a river, and a squirrel.

    The Chimney Rocks, circa 1975.

    The Upper Iowa River winds through some of the Midwest’s most beautiful countryside. The best of the best is the Chimney Rocks area near the tiny town of Bluffton. The Chimney Rocks are a set of limestone bluffs that form rounded towers a hundred feet or more above the river.

    Early one morning, my friend Jon and I were creeping along the top of the Chimney Rocks, rifles in hand, searching for gray squirrels. A barking squirrel in a large hickory had drawn my attention, and in a stalk with all the sophistication and woodcraft available to a teenage boy, I had managed to close the gap to about 30 yards. Doing this, however, had necessitated creeping along the very edge of the bluff…

    The more intuitive among you, dear readers, have probably already seen this one coming.

    I could see the squirrel’s tail jerking as he barked a greeting to the morning. Another step and I’d have a shot.

    The structure of the Chimney Rocks was such that the edge was somewhat, well, frangible. Pieces of limestone would occasionally detach themselves from the top edge of the bluff, to splash seconds later, through six inches of water, into the gravel riverbed far, far below.

    The Chimney Rocks are composed of marine limestone, formed under some primeval ocean, countless millions of years before there were squirrels, boys, or .22 rifles. Over the eons, the limestone hardened, the oceans receded, the land rose. Over that unimaginable stretch of time leading to the present, the Upper Iowa River formed, eroded though a hundred or more feet of rock in forming its present channel. The Upper Iowa River flowed along the Chimney Rocks before Indians came to what is now Iowa. When Columbus set out in three tiny ships for the New World, the Upper Iowa flowed placidly through the woods and meadows of this place, and the Chimney Rocks stood watch over the river as now. When Patrick Henry shouted about liberty and death to the Continental Congress, the Chimney Rocks stood over the river, unconcerned. When thousands of Americans went off to fight in two world wars, the Upper Iowa and the Chimney Rocks were unimpressed. It was only after all those events, after that vast, unknowable stretch of geologic time, that I came in my eye-blink of time, to hunt squirrels on the upper edge of the Chimney Rocks. On that particular stretch of the bluffs, where I crept closer to the tantalizing flick of a gray squirrel’s tail, a section of the edge of the cliff stood as it had for millennia, waiting for a seminal event in the Earth’s history.

    That seminal event, of course, was my stepping on that section of the cliff top. A large section of the cliff face – the section I was standing on – chose that moment – that precise moment! After millions of years of geologic time, after all the seasons, all the events, the section of cliff face chose that moment to give way and tumble to the river a hundred feet below.

    Not being entirely willing to plummet a hundred feet into the river myself, I grabbed the only lifeline offered – a two-inch sapling growing near the new edge of the cliff. I then found myself in the interesting predicament of being suspended over a vast gulf of chilly mid-western air, a hundred feet over a six-inch deep river with a hard rock bottom. I had a rapidly shrinking sapling in one hand and my rifle in the other.

    The squirrel bounded to the end of his limb and looked down. I wasn’t aware until that time that squirrels could adopt an intolerably smug expression.

    Several seconds later, the detached rocks pattered into the water far below.

    With the usual teenage aplomb, I flung the rifle up over the edge, to free my other hand; I was unable, however, to reach the sapling with my free hand.

    After several years (well, it was probably only several seconds) it occurred to me that my salvation lay in my hunting partner Jon, who still stalked tree-dwelling rodents some fifty yards away. With a voice pitched a couple of octaves higher than normal, I calmly called to him.

    “Hey! I could use a hand over here, Jon!”

    Jon wasn’t known as a particularly bright character, but he did possess a certain primitive slyness.

    “Are you trying to get me to spook him your way?” Jon replied, referring to the squirrel. “You can’t catch me that way! I’ll be on him in a minute!”

    The squirrel grinned down at me from the branch.

    “Jon, just get over here!”

    Jon, walking towards the sound of my voice, was rather intrigued to find a .22 rifle lying unattended on the ground. At this point, even his primitive intellect sensed something amiss.

    “Say,” Jon noted, “You can’t shoot no squirrel without your rifle.”

    At this point, the sapling had shrunk to approximately the diameter of 2-pound test monofilament. The squirrel made himself comfortable on the end of his limb, in anticipation of shortly seeing a teenage boy attempt to fly.

    Well, to make a long story short, Jon eventually saw my hand holding onto the sapling, and my arm disappearing, strangely, over the edge of the cliff. At this point, he realized that something had to be done and with a strength born of all his summers of tossing hay bales, he got hold of my wrist and managed to haul me to safety.

    As I sat a few feet back from the edge that had almost led to the early and catastrophic end to my career, gasping hard enough to strip leaves off of bushes fifty feet away, Jon handed me my .22. The squirrel, sensing a reversal in his fortunes, had long since departed.

    We trudged back to Jon’s van in silence.

    Finally, as he was starting his ancient and asthmatic Dodge van, Jon decided to break the silence.

    “So, I guess you didn’t get a shot at him, huh?”

    As the years have gone on, I’ve grown somewhat more cautious. With age comes wisdom, after all, or so I’m told. (My wife may disagree.) In Colorado, mountain terrain offers unique opportunities for some really spectacular falls while pursuing mule deer and elk. Still, my record is improving, and my id and ego don’t fight over things as they used to, perhaps because 50-something-year old bodies don’t recover from spectacular drops onto sharp rocks as well as 15-year old ones do:

    EGO: “Listen, those rocks are probably pretty stable. And you’re at least ten feet from that drop off, and the slope’s not that steep. You did see an elk over there three weeks ago, remember?”

    ID: “I don’t like this. That’s at least a two hundred foot drop off, and I don’t think it’s ten feet, I think it’s more like three.”

    EGO: “Well, maybe you’re right. Let’s go back to camp for a sandwich.”

    Some things really do improve with age!

  • Animal’s 2018 Hunt Report

    Planning

    Loyal sidekick Rat and I pretty much plan our year around our primary hunting season.

    This year, while we put in for and drew tags for deer, cow elk, and bear, the primary draw for us both were buck deer tags for the 30,000-acre Bosque del Oso State Wildlife Area in Colorado Game Management Unit (GMU) 851, west of Trinidad and very close to the New Mexico border. My project work in New Jersey this year forced me to pick one particular hunt, so the difficult-to-draw Bosque received out attention.

    So, we did our map recons, cleaned, serviced and checked zero on rifles, prepared sidearms, sharpened knives, packed camping gear and everything else into the inestimable Rojito and headed for the Bosque the Friday before the season opened.  We got down to the area early enough on Friday to have a quick vehicular scout around, seeing two big gangs of wild turkeys and a few does, but no bucks.  That mattered little to us at that time, though, with a full five-day season ahead.  A day-by-day recap of that season follows.

    Day One

    Cherry Canyon.

    Opening Day dawned bright, clear and warm.  That makes for a great day camping and woods-bumming, but not a great day for hunting.  The woods were bone-dry, which made moving a lot like walking through dry corn flakes.

    The Bosque was obtained by the State of Colorado, assisted by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, from a natural gas extraction company.  Natural gas extraction is still going on there as part of the purchase agreement, so while access into the Bosque by hunters is limited to foot or horseback traffic from the few designated parking areas, there are good roads for into the unit and we used those on opening day to make a quiet, if not really stealthy, foray far into the right fork of Apache Canyon on the north side of the Bosque.  We took a good stand on a hillside overlooking a wide place in the canyon for a while but saw nothing other than scrub jays and chipmunks.  Later we walked almost off the end of the property, seeing signs of black bear and turkeys, but no deer.

    Mid-day usually doesn’t see much movement on warm, clear days, so we went up Bingham Canyon and proceeded to crawl Rojito up the ultimate portion of the access road, known to the local game wardens as the “Jeep Trail.”  It lived up to its name, about a three or four mile climb up a steep, narrow path littered with boulders.  It was a bad trail but nothing Rojito and I hadn’t done before, so when we conquered the trail, Rat and I admired the view for a bit, knowing that once any precipitation came in we wouldn’t be able to return.  There was no deer sign about, so we headed back down.

    In the late afternoon we went over to the eastern edge of the Bosque.  By this time, it was t-shirt weather, but we walked up into Cherry Canyon.  That location is much drier and more open than Apache, but while we saw some tracks, we saw no deer.  But we knew colder, wetter weather was to move in overnight, which normally gets deer moving, so after repasting on Rat’s patented Heart-Stopper Bacon Bacon Cheese Bacon Double Bacon Cheeseburgers with sides of bacon, we retired that night optimistic for the next day.

    Day Two

    Rat, glassing from a ridgeline.

    When we awoke on Sunday morning, the temperature had dropped noticeably, and the sky was low and gray, which boded well for seeing game.  We headed again over to the eastern part of the Bosque, this time up Alamosita Canyon, a big, open canyon with pines on the south-facing slope and junipers and sage on the north-facing slope.

    The wind was right in our faces as we left Rojito and headed on foot up the gas company road – ideal.   Stepping slowly, we moved quietly up the road and into the broad canyon.

    Not long after we entered the canyon and began ninja-ing our way up through the sage, over the top of a small spur poking out from the canyon wall to the left came two forkhorn mulies, maybe 60 yards away.

    “Nice meat bucks,” I whispered to Rat.  “Want one?”

    Rat’s deer.

    Rat replied by dropping to one knee and taking aim.  I watched through binoculars as he fired, sending a 165-grain .30-06 pill right into the bigger buck’s vitals.  Through the glass, I saw a big puff of hair explode from the buck’s far side and knew we had a dead deer; the buck hadn’t quite figured that out yet and ran in about a 150-yard semicircle up the hillside, crossing a gas wellhead clear-cut and dying on the far side.  When we found the buck, we could look about a hundred yards down the hill and see Rojito parked; as the Bosque allows using the gas company roads to retrieve game during midday hours, once Rat had the buck dressed we were able to pull Rojito up to within thirty feet or so to load the deer up.

    I have to say here, I’ve shot deer I had to drag for miles and miles to get out, which really makes one appreciate a convenient extraction for once.

    Then the snow moved in.

    By the time we had Rat’s deer loaded the sky was spitting wet pellets of snow, which were beginning to accumulate.  Since Trinidad was only about 20 miles distant, and since our featureless campsite had nary a tree from which to suspend a game pole, we decided to run the buck into town for processing.  On the drive out of Alamosita we saw on an adjacent sage flat another forkhorn meat buck, a near twin for Rat’s.  Rat asked me if I wanted to sneak in and get a shot at him, but I kind of wanted a bigger buck, so declined.  We ran Rat’s buck into town to the processor, grabbed a hot sandwich, and rode back out to the Bosque and ventured once more up the right fork of Apache Canyon.

    Not really suitable for cold weather.

    There we remained until night was coming on but found no fresh tracks other than those of a cow elk who had crossed the canyon on her way somewhere in the previous hour or so.  Even so, we went back to our cold dry camp that evening with one deer in the bag and confident of the prospects for a second.

    Day Three

    Cold.

    On the third day, my luck changed, and not just because I was still toting around a 10-pound .338 Win Mag whilst loyal sidekick Rat was happily hiking along encumbered only by his day pack and sidearm.

    The snow had stopped, but the day was still chilly (low 30s) and the sky still mostly cloudy.  We ascended Torres Canyon in the morning and saw a few tracks in the recent snow but no bucks.  Spotting a few does on the road over to Alamosita gave me a bit of hope, but despite a long afternoon tramp up the canyon that had been good to us the day before, we saw no shootable bucks.  By day’s end I gave up most of my hopes for a big buck and determined, with two days left, to take a meat buck if the opportunity presented itself.

    High point of the day, though, was watching several huge flocks of sandhill cranes as the afternoon sky cleared.  The big birds were flying high and heading south, and as always, we marveled at how their cries came down so clearly from their considerable altitude.  It’s a sound always associated with hunting in southern Colorado.

    Day Four

    Alamosita Canyon

    The penultimate day of our five-day hunt broke clear and cold.

    With Rat again happily unencumbered by his rifle, we decided to hike up the left fork of Apache Canyon, having previously only gone up the right fork.  That side of the canyon was a little narrower than the right fork, heavily wooded on both sides, steeper and rockier on the north-facing slopes.

    The warm afternoon before had melted snow and produced mud in open areas which had frozen overnight, preserving tracks.  We cut some interesting trails:  A trio of turkeys being trailed by a bobcat, a mountain lion track left in the snow, and tracks of fox, coyote, rabbits and pine marten.  But the big event of that hike was when the sound of a rock tapping down the canyon wall to our right led us to see two bull elk trying to pick their way along the slope to get out of our sight.  One was a middling five-by-five, but the other was a huge, magnificent six-by-six that any elk hunter would have been proud to have on the wall.  The bulls were a mere hundred and fifty yards away and could have been easily taken, but we had no elk tags for the Bosque, and so we watched them picking their way slowly along the steep, rocky slope until they were out of sight.

    Bobcat, tracking turkeys. Hope he scored.
    Lion track.

    Then, this being a Tuesday, misfortune struck.  A large drilling rig and its crew entered the left fork and proceeded to drive up the company road, making a fair amount of noise and pretty much scotching any idea of hunting that canyon any further.  Rat and I walked on out, picked up Rojito in the parking lot and decided to hit one place we had not yet explored, that being the nearby Cirueta Canyon.  As it happened, we didn’t get to explore that location.

    On the approach to the canyon’s parking area, we spotted a gang of mulies in a creek bottom not far from the road.  We determined that there was one forkhorn meat buck in the band of does.

    Now I’m no fan of road-hunting, but when the blood-wind blows you such an obvious prize, it’s folly not to accept.  As Rat was driving, I grabbed Thunder Speaker, bailed from the vehicle and creeped into the creek bottom, moving from juniper bush to juniper bush to within about sixty yards of the little buck.  Finding an opening in the juniper in front of me, I slid Thunder Speaker through the branches, rested the fore-end on one large branch and let fly.  The little buck was facing me with his head high; I put a .338 pill right between his front quarters.  He ran about sixty yards – towards the road, mind you – and collapsed.  Once again, the extraction was easy, which was something of a first, having that happen twice in one season; I don’t know about most of you, but I rarely have that kind of luck.

    Thus ended the 2018 mule deer hunt, with no trophies but plenty of high-quality, additive-free, free range venison in the freezer.  Any day hunting is better than the best day working, and a day when you bring home venison is just that much better.

    Other Notable Events

    About to tag my freezer-filler.

    An observation:  I’ve always maintained (and have done so here in previous articles) that you can shoot little stuff with a big gun, but you can’t shoot big stuff with a little gun.  While this is true, in the case of this year’s plump little meat buck I ran across the down side of that.  While my shot killed my buck quickly – and I will tell you, a .338 Win Mag will put down a 125-pound deer right now – there was a drawback, as the buck wasn’t facing me straight-on but quartering a little more than I had suspected, so that my 225-grain .338 bullet exited rather forcefully through the right front quarter, destroying most of that quarter’s edible meat.  So, I will have to bear that in mind in future deer-only expeditions.

    Sunday evening (Day Two) the weather precluded cooking in camp and the cold had us wanting a hot meal, so as evening set in we headed down the road to the village of Segundo.  The general store and deli at that location were already closed, but the bar across the highway (Sam’s, in case you’re ever in that area) was open, and while they didn’t have a menu they did have a free-lunch counter consisting of an open bag of chips, some cookies, and a big crock full of sausages alongside a supply of rolls and condiments.  We had out hot meal, but the real entertainment of that evening was meeting the man who was apparently the inspiration for the character Gabby Johnson in Blazing Saddles.  He was an older gent with an impressive beard and did speak authentic frontier gibberish, offering such gems as “Ash-a-stebba garage cat inna gorge thang” and “Mer dawg issa horsa bit off da kin beet.”

    And, finally, having tagged out a day early gave us an afternoon to explore Trinidad.  In case you aren’t familiar with that Colorado metropolis, Trinidad is an old mining town a few miles from Raton Pass and the New Mexico border.  While most of the mining in the area has faded away, it seems to have been replaced by recreational weed, as we counted over twenty rec-weed shops during the two or three hours we spent strolling around town seeking cold beers.  That close to the New Mexico border, I suppose that should come as a surprise to no one.

    What’s Next?

    A few more cold nights in the old summer-weight tent has us now shopping for a canvas wall tent with a stovepipe hole, to keep us warmer of an evening; that will make sleeping a whole lot more pleasant.  But plans for next season always seem to begin during an actual hunt, and sights seen in the Bosque have me determined to seek fall turkey and bear tags for the area in coming years.  Rat and I also have a wealth of preference points for elk but haven’t yet decided what to spend them on.

    Any day hunting is indeed better than any day working.  Work may beckon now, but there are a lot of grouse and other small game in Pennsylvania, not so far from my temporary New Jersey digs, so watch for some news from that quarter soon.

  • No, Not That Springfield Armory. The Other Springfield Armory.

    Yes, a Blue Point Ale. Don’t know why they call it that since it’s neither blue nor pointy.

    Boston

    A few years back I took on some work in the Boston area.  And, as I usually do, I took the opportunity to see everything I could, including such landmarks as the Boston Common, the Old North Church, Paul Revere’s house, and Sam Adams’ grave.  I also spent some enjoyable Saturday afternoons hoisting Blue Point Ales in Durty Nellie’s.  That fine establishment advertises itself as the North End’s best dive bar, and I see no evidence to the contrary.

    In fact, Boston quickly became my favorite major city, after Denver.

    I saw stuff outside of Boston as well.  Now, Taxachusetts isn’t a state known for the shooting sports, but over in Springfield (otherwise an unremarkable town) they do have a major landmark in American shooting history:  The Springfield Armory.

    No, not that Springfield Armory.  The original Springfield Armory, now the Springfield Armory National Historic Site and Museum.  This was America’s original Arsenal of the Republic (I know FDR described an Arsenal of Democracy, but the United States is a Republic, dammit, not a democracy; Roosevelt should have known better.)

    …and The Armory!

    Established in 1777, the Armory produced such items as gun carriages and cartridges until 1795, when they started building muskets.  This began a long history of producing small arms for the U.S. military for almost two hundred years.  In their long history, the Armory produced everything from flintlock muskets to the M60 machine gun.  That run included such landmarks in gun history as the 1903 Springfield and M1 Garand rifles, but the Armory also pioneered mass-production manufacturing techniques, including use of the Blanchard Lathe to mass-produce interchangeable gun stocks.

    It’s a neat place for the gun lover to visit, but enough about the history; you can get that anywhere.  Instead, I’ll describe some highlights of my own visit.

    I’ve fired weapons that came from the Armory.  I’ve owned weapons that came from the Armory; two 1903 Springfield rifles in various states of sporterization, but the actions came from the Springfield Armory.  In my time in Uncle Sam’s colors I handled M60 machine guns (the infamous Pig) and M2 .50 calibers that almost certainly were built in Springfield.  So, my visit to the Museum was even more fascinating because of that connection.

    The Guns

    Front-Stuffers.

    Front-stuffers are fun, and the Springfield Armory made a lot of them, starting with the Model 1795 flintlock smoothbore musket to the Civil War-era percussion rifle-muskets.  But while the Springfield 1862 Rifle-Musket may have been the key weapon that won the Civil War, the museum shows much more than just the products of the once and former Armory; the racks are full on one-offs, prototypes, weapons of note made in other locations, and even weapons fielded by other nations, but allies and foes.  In the museum you can see development models and prototypes from the first Allin conversions that became the trapdoor Springfield rifles, to the development models of the famous M1 Garand, all the actual guns, on display.

    It’s a fascinating visit for the gun aficionado.

    My Personal Favorites

    This history of the M1 rifle, the famous Garand, described by George Patton as “the finest implement of battle ever designed” is represented in detail.  Every working model, every prototype is there.  The early ones are (not surprisingly) crude, being built just to test concepts.  What’s really interesting is how you can watch refinement after refinement until, at last, the familiar shape of the M1 takes place.  I’ve long desired an M1 for my own gun rack, for no particular reason other than its place in history; it’s really interesting to see how this groundbreaking rifle was developed.

    Also documented in the museum is the search for a lightweight military rifle, which search culminated in the M16 platform.  This project originated with variations on the M14, also a product of the Springfield Armory and the United States’ last MBR (Main Battle Rifle.)  While the M16 was not developed or built at the Armory, the rifles that it replaced were, and the Armory was involved in the testing of the lightweight carbine.  The wisdom of giving up having an MBR ready for issue was, apparently, not discussed.

    Another neat not-produced-at Springfield display presents the small arms of both World Wars, not only those of the United States but also our allies and enemies.  Such items as the Mauser, SMLE, Mosin-Nagant, the various submachine guns and sidearms, all are present.  It’s an interesting look at the weapons used in the two great wars of the last century.

    So, there.

    Pictures really are worth a thousand words.  I could describe the various displays in the Museum all day, but I’m sure you’d all rather see for yourselves.  Since you can’t, unless you go to Springfield, you’ll have to settle for the photos with which I have liberally sprinkled this article.  Enjoy!

  • Elk Hunting Is A Species of Insanity.

    I’ve talked about elk hunting here a few times; so let’s explore a particular hunt I took about fifteen years ago, which still sticks in my mind as the worst day I’ve ever spent at my favorite pastime.

    It was worse than this.

    I do wonder sometimes what drives people like me to hunt elk. What mystery is about elk that makes us leave warm beds long before dawn to tramp high in icy mountains?

    In the past, I’ve always concluded the experience was reason enough.  It’s reason enough to be out in the early morning in the high country, to enjoy the company of trusted friends, and to thrill to the ringing bugle of a bull echoing through aspens shining gold in the autumn sunshine.

    And then came one particular opening day that changed my thinking.  It was a day when I quit my warm bed for a late-season cow hunt.  This day started awful.  Things got worse after that.

    It was a frigid morning when we left my friend’s cabin in Eagle at five in the morning, and a nasty, driving, wet snow/rain mixture was spitting from the starless, leaden sky.  During the half-hour drive out to Salt Creek, my hunting partner Karl and I speculated on the wisdom of climbing to the top of the plateau we intended to hunt.  But drive out there we did, and when we dismounted from Karl’s truck, the weather had gotten worse.  We stepped into the lee of the truck to plan our morning.

    “I’ll stay to the west of that big outcrop,” I told Karl, pointing at a dimly seen stump of red shale sticking out of the sagebrush, “And you stay to the east.  Meet back at the truck by four?”

    “Okay,” Karl said.

    “This weather stinks,” I grumbled.  I was already soaked through.

    “At least it’ll be quiet.”  The early seasons in Colorado had been warm and dry; my September bear hunt had been rendered almost impossible by woods in which every footfall sounded like I’d stepped in a pile of dry cornflakes.  Hoping that some snow would grace the late elk seasons, I’d bought a leftover late season cow tag.  No wall-hanger trophy my goal this year, but rather a freezer full of elk steaks.

    My hunting partner Karl had a bull tag.  Karl went off into the heavy timber in search of a six-by-six, while I climbed to the top of the plateau to find a good place to glass for a freezer-filler.

    It proved to be a grueling journey.  Elk hunting is never a picnic, but this climb would be burned into my memory.  Every scrub oak, every juniper I bumped sent a shower of wet snow down the back of my neck with uncanny accuracy.  Open areas between the trees were covered with sagebrush, a neat trick pulled by nature to make sure that my wool pants got soaked through in between fresh loads of snow dropped on me from the trees.  The wet increased the weight of my daypack by approximately forty pounds, and my rifle lay in my arms like an anvil.  Nature seemed full of malign intent that morning.

    After a half-hour struggle I finally gained a vantage point.  I found a chunk of rock that looked less sharp-edged than the others, brushed off a couple of inches of slush, and sat down.

    Glassing wasn’t very productive, but occasionally the sleet would slack off long enough for me to see a mile or so.  During one of those lulls I was able to finally get a look into the high meadows on the mountainside on the other side of the Salt Creek drainage, and sure enough…

    “Oh, crap,” I whispered to my private self, alone as I was on a lifeless, frigid, dripping mountainside.

    It was the worst possible scenario.  Across the drainage was a herd of cows, maybe twenty elk, dark shapes grazing contentedly a mile or so away.  With a groan of frustration, I let my binoculars drop to the end of their cord.

    It was much worse than this.

    There was nothing else for it; my own stubbornness and the mysterious drive for an elk drove me on.  I picked my way carefully down the mountain, back down through the junipers and sage, down to Salt Creek.  The road we had driven in on paralleled the creek, and I came out maybe a half-mile downstream from the truck.  I still had to find a way across Salt Creek.

    The only opportunity to cross was on a beaver dam that looked to have been built sometime during the Eisenhower Administration by some particularly careless and stupid beavers.  I told myself, “Myself, if I fall into that water, I’ll die of hypothermia before I can get back to the truck.”

    I looked at the water, swirling dark and frigid like liquid onyx, chunks of ice bobbing carelessly in the current.  Overhead the sodden spruces nodded at me, go on, go on.

    The elk wouldn’t wait forever.  I stepped out on the beaver dam.  The sticks shifted slightly under my weight; my entire digestive tract tightened reflexively.  Trying with all my mental might to levitate most of my weight off the dam, I slowly picked my way across.  When I gained the far bank, I let go the breath I’d been holding, blowing snow off the trees for a good twenty yards.  Now all I had to do was to hike carefully up through a half-mile or so of dark timber to where the elk were, in that sodden meadow, on the other side of the wet and dripping trees.

    The sleet picked up a little as I climbed, but the spruces protected me from some of it.  I took my time climbing over down trees and scrambling through a few ancient piles of slashing left by malicious loggers.  After an interminable time, I reached the edge of the meadow.  I crept stealthily, oh so stealthily; I crept like smoke on the wind to the edge of the frigid meadow and peeked carefully around the bole of a big spruce, which promptly discharged another helping of wet snow down the back of my neck.

    No elk.

    I dodged another volley of wet snow from the spruce and stuck my head out a little further, scanned from one end of the meadow to the other.

    No elk.

    I fumbled with cold-numbed fingers for my binoculars, and carefully glassed the tree line all about.  A dollop of snow splattered against the binocular objectives, forcing me to stop and clean them before resuming the search.

    No elk.

    I double-checked the wind.  It blew with near-gale force in my face, as it had been during the whole freezing, soaking, miserable stalk.  The wind blew a pat of wet snow from another tree to hit me in the mouth.  I glassed the tree line again.

    No elk.

    Finally, I walked out into the meadow, sloshed my way through the accumulating sleet and slush to the spot I’d seen the elk feeding.  No tracks.  The sleet/slush/rain/wrath of God that was falling that morning had eliminated every trace.

    No elk.

    I looked around the clearing.  No clues offered themselves as to where the elk had gone, where they were at the moment, what they were doing, where they were going.

    Well, there was nothing else to do, so I sloshed back down through the spruces, through the slash piles, over the down trees, to the beaver dam.  Crossing carefully over the dam with my heart in my throat, I came at last to the road.  I stood for a moment, looking up at the impassive monolith of the plateau I’d already climbed once that day.  The wind and snow seemed to be getting colder.

    “Enough’s enough,” I thought, and slogged on back up to Karl’s truck, to find him asleep in the warm truck cab.

    I opened the door and gently shook Karl awake, only breaking one of his teeth and loosening three fillings in the process.  “Oh, you’re back,” he belabored the obvious.  “I gave up hours ago.  Damn weather.  You see anything?”

    It was a lot worse than this.

    I filled him in on the entire miserable morning.

    “Oh, you went after them clear up there?” he replied, his eyes wide with amazement.  “You should have been up where I was.  Just about a quarter of a mile from here, on that nice flat ground under the bluff.  I walked right into a big gang of cows.  I had three of them standing within fifty feet of me.”

    I fought down the urge to do him an injury.  “Let’s go back to the cabin and dry out.”

    Later, when we went out again for the afternoon hunt, the rain/sleet/slush/snow had stopped, and while the sky was still overcast, the clouds had brightened some.  With our hunting togs dried out, we were quite comfortable.

    It seemed kind of dull, somehow.  Something of the challenge was gone.

    I still sometimes wonder what it is that drives us to hunt elk.  There must be more to it than the meat in the freezer, the company of friends, and the scenery.  There must be something deep, something primeval, something about the elk that speaks to us on a very basic level.  There must be something that challenges us to voluntarily make the effort our ancestors had to make, if they were to survive.

    After that wet, freezing day on Salt Creek, I think I may be a little closer to understanding the answer.

    We’re probably a little bit crazy.  But it’s a damn good kind of crazy.

  • What Happened To The 10 and 16 Gauge?

    What Happened to the 10 and 16 Gauges?

    The Sweet, Sweet Belgian Sixteen.

    Most folks who play around with shotguns know that, back in the day, there were a lot more shotgun gauges available than there are now.  These days the 12-gauge is riding tall in the saddle, with the 20-gauge doing duty as a gun for youths and the small-framed, and the old .410 bore (not gauge) finding some use among elite skeet shooters and kids learning the business.

    What happened to those other gauges?  As recently as the post WW2 years, the 10 and 16-gauge loads were still seeing plenty of use.  The 16 still remains popular in Europe, at least in those localities where the peasantry are allowed to own fowling pieces.  But Stateside?  Those have mostly faded out, leaving the 12 and 20 holding the bag.  The 24 and 32-gauge guns were never popular Stateside (although I just examined a lovely 32-gauge double in a New Jersey gun shop the other day) and the big 4 and 8-gauge guns were mostly used by market hunters, not sportsmen.  The odd little 28 is still around, and new guns aren’t too hard to find, but like the .410 it’s mostly used on the skeet ranges and quail fields;  unlike the .410 it’s not found much in youth-type guns.

    But the highly useful 10 and 16s are not much in use these days.  Why?  First, let’s run through some background on shotguns.

    What Do Shotgun Gauges Mean?

    Shell sizes, including a couple of real monsters.

    Gauge as measured in shotguns is an archaic measure of bore size.  A shotgun’s gauge is defined as the number of pure lead balls, the bore size of the gun, that it takes to add up to one pound.  For modern purposes, bore sizes for the several gauges are defined as:

    • 10 gauge: .775
    • 12 gauge: .729
    • 16 gauge: .663
    • 20 gauge: .615
    • 28 gauge: .550

    The .410 is the odd man out, being defined by the actual bore size.  Interestingly, the .444 Marlin rifle cartridge was originally loosely based on the .410 brass shotgun case, and there are revolvers ostensibly chambered for the .45 Colt that will also chamber and fire 2 ½” .410 shells, which strikes me as a solution in desperate need of a problem; but, as my Grandpa used to say, every cat its own rat.

    A recent (as in, post-WW2) development in shotgun loads is the addition of lengthened “magnum” hulls.  The 3” 12-gauge was first, followed by the 3” 20-gauge, the 3 ½” 10-gauge and finally the 3 ½” 12-gauge Roman candles.  The .410, originally a 2 ½” case, had a 3” version developed, while the 28 and 16 gauges never joined the fun, still being available only in 2 ¾” versions.  This is significant for reasons we’ll go into in a bit.

    Guns and Loads

    This is where we run into one of the reasons that the 10-gauge faded out.  The 10-gauge was mostly favored by waterfowlers, who generally are stationary in a blind and not hiking over hill and dale looking for birds like upland hunters.  There’s a good reason for this; geese and even ducks are tough, heavily feathered birds who take some knocking down, and even the old 2 7/8” 10-gauge loads threw big charges of heavy shot idea for this task.  But the guns made for the big 10 were mostly large, long, heavy doubles, some weighing as much as 10 pounds.  In the late Seventies the 10 saw a bit of a renaissance with the introduction of the Ithaca Mag 10, and later Browning introduced a 10-gauge version of its BPS bottom-ejection pump-gun in 10-gauge.  But both guns remained big, long and heavy; I’ve fired an Ithaca Mag 10 and it’s like swinging a telephone pole.

    The introduction of the 3” magnum 12-gauge and, later, the 3 ½” sealed the fate of the big 10.  Now a hunter after a variety of game could buy a 12-gauge light enough to tote in the upland game fields that would still handle heavy magnum loads suitable for waterfowl or turkey.

    With this, the 10 has kind of faded into the sunset.  You still see them in the hands of hardcore waterfowlers, and ammo is still readily available, but the big 10 is now strictly a niche market item.  And that’s too bad, because a hardcore waterfowler would be hard pressed to find a better gun for big Canada honkers or fast, tough mallards than a 3 ½” 10-gauge shell throwing two ounces of bismuth shot.  The Browning BPS-10 is still available factory-new, and there are plenty of Ithaca Mag 10s and its later development, the Remington SP-10, on the used gun market.

    But the sweet 16?  That’s a whole ‘nother thing to ponder.

    The big, tough action of the Ithaca Mag-10.

    Why?  Because none of the niche market criticism of the 10-gauge applies to the 16.  The 16 may well be the perfect happy medium in shotguns.  It can be chambered in small-framed guns, as Browning did in the famous Sweet Sixteen version of the Auto-5; that fine gun put the 16-gauge shell in a gun using the small frame designed for the 20.  I have one and it’s a joy to handle, almost a full pound light than its 12-gauge counterpart.  Ditto for the 16-gauge Model 12 Winchester.

    The 16, in a stiff field load, packs plenty of wallop for big ringnecks and sage grouse, while the light, handy 16-gauge guns are light and handy enough for grouse, quail and doves.  My 16s are great for just those things; Mrs. Animal is a fan of the 16 as well and has two, a newer Citori White Lightning from a limited run in that chambering and a 1950s-vintage Ithaca 37.  Up through roughly the late 1950s, plenty of American bird hunters agreed and the 16 remained popular.

    So, what happened?  Three things:  The increasing popularity of trapshooting, the 12-gauge 3” magnum and the 20-gauge 3” magnum.

    Trapshooting is and always has been a 12-gauge game.  The 12’s bore is just enough larger than the 20 or 16 to toss a one-ounce load of 7 ½s in a nice, tight compact pattern with a short shot column, ideal for powdering clay birds.  In light trap loads recoil isn’t an issue, and dedicated trap guns can be heavy enough to eliminate even that bit of kick.  But more to the point, the increasing appearance of trap ranges at American gun clubs led to a lot of folks taking their field guns out to the trap range to get some practice in, and the nature of trap shooting over the much more predictable skeet made it better practice for wing shooting – at least, until the advent of sporting clays.

    But ammo – that’s where the bite really came, and when it came, it came from two directions.  And in this case, it wasn’t so much the new 3” mags in 12 and 20-gauge as the 16’s sin of omission in not doing the same.

    Following the advent of the 3” magnums in both 12 and 20-gauge, shooters who may previously have chosen a 16 as a great gun-of-all-trades no longer had as much incentive to do so.  The 12 was suddenly now much more versatile, coming close to rivaling the 10 as a duck/goose/turkey gun while retaining utility that the 10 lacked for upland game, a trend continued by the later lengthening of the 12-gauge chamber to 3 ½”.  For a shooter looking for one gun for all work, the 12 was now the clear choice; I’ve said as much myself, that if a person can only afford one gun, period, end of story, then that person should go forth and buy a 12-gauge pump shotgun.

    Moving down the size spectrum, young shooters and those with small frames now had greater reason to choose the 20 over the 16.  Both rounds were available in light, small-frame guns but suddenly the 20 opened up with a much wider variety of ammo available, including some loads that approached the level of older 12-gauge 2 ¾” field loads.

    Meanwhile, the 16 languished in its 2 ¾” hull length, and sales of guns and shells declined.  In the early 1970s, Winchester dropped production of its excellent AA trap loads in 16 gauge, and thus one of the last sources of high-quality low-brass 16-gauge hulls dried up; nowadays Winchester, Remington and Federal are still loading 16-gauge rounds but mostly in field versions with cheap, crappy promotional ammo dominating.  Fiocchi still loads a variety of 16-gauge loads as the round is still more popular in Europe than here in the States, so the 16-gauge fan still has some options, but non-toxic loads for waterfowl are pretty limited, and new guns are not much in evidence.

    The Upside

    16 Gauge Model 12

    Yes, there’s an upside to all this, especially if you’re a 16-gauge fan or are in the market for a big, powerful waterfowl-buster.  What’s that upside?  The market!

    10- gauge and 16-gauge guns aren’t in much demand these days.  There are some exceptions; the Browning Sweet Sixteen Auto-5, especially Belgian guns, still commands a premium price, mostly because of collectors (like me.)  But Browning BPS-10s aren’t terribly expensive on the used gun market; Winchester Model 97s and Model 12s as well as Ithaca 37s and Remington 11s are readily available in 16-gauge versions and often at attractive prices.

    And there’s hope, at least for the 16.  The new, supposedly improved (and in my opinion, uglier) Browning Auto-Five is now available in a Sweet Sixteen version; the Browning Citori and the various CZ doubles are available in that gauge as well.  Could we be seeing a minor renaissance in the best of all mid-range shotgun loads?  Maybe.  Time will tell.

    The “Other Gauges”

    Obscure gauges like the 24 and 32 were never popular in the United States.  In the case of these oddballs, it’s not a matter of them fading out as much as that they never faded in in the first place.  But could these in-betweeners be useful?

    Sure.  The aforementioned 32-gauge European double I examined the other day would make a sweet little item for hiking hills and swales for grouse.  Fiocchi still loads 32-gauge shells, although loads are limited to a #6 field load and a lighter upland load with #8 shot; but this pretty little tiny-framed double with its graceful slim barrels and its lovely European walnut stock really belongs in the field, not languishing in some gun shop’s rack where it won’t likely move because of its odd chambering.

    The 24, on the other hand, is one where I can’t really offer much information.  As far as I’ve been able to determine the 24 isn’t loaded by anyone anymore, and I couldn’t tell you the last time I stumbled across a 24-gauge gun.  While the 16 was left behind by advances in neighboring gauges, the 24 seems to have died a death of apathy.

    In Conclusion…

    Old shotguns are fun.

    Now that I’m done belaboring the obvious:  Just because a certain shotgun gauge is no longer popular doesn’t mean it’s not useful.  Mrs. Animal and I have a lot of fun with our 16-gauge guns, and after our move to The Great Land, I may be in the market for a big 10 to bust tough northern geese for the table.  I’d love for Winchester to bring back an AA trap load in 16-gauge, but then I’d love for someone to bring back the .25 Stevens rimfire again – or even bring out a nice new light lever gun in the .25-20.  I probably won’t get any of those things, but the world’s got no shortage of windmills to tilt at.

    If you have some extra bucks to indulge in a shooting addiction, don’t overlook the 16.  The story of the oddball gauges is an interesting one and, given the changes in technology and markets, may have been inevitable, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth another look.

  • Guns And Such For Small Game

    Guns and Practices for Small Game

    Folks who are, like me, of the outdoorsy persuasion, like to talk about big game hunting.  Why?  Because it’s exciting.  Big stuff with horns, hooves and pointy teeth are more exciting to hunt, and to talk about.

    But when it comes to hunting opportunities, you can’t beat small game.  The amount of time you can spend afield in pursuit of small game far outweighs limited big-game seasons, and anything from squirrels to pheasants produces some of the best eating you’ve ever laid teeth on.  And, for the prepper/TEOTOWAKI set, small game hunting for food is far more likely to be a problem you need to solve than fighting off Mad-Maxian bands of raiders.

    So, let’s look at arms and equipment for small stuff.

    Rifles

    Rimfire rifles kind of rule the roost for small game hunting nowadays, but it was not always thus.  One of the best small-game cartridges around back in the day is the old .25-20, still available in old Winchester 92s if you’re willing to shell out the bucks for and shoot a collectible.  The Winchester 43 bolt gun was also available in this fine old round, and likewise commands a high price.  The .25-20 is a great small game round when loaded moderately with a hard-cast lead bullet, killing game up to woodchuck-size very nicely without tearing up as much meat as a .22 high-velocity hollow point.  But centerfire rifles for this and similar old small game rounds aren’t made today, with one exception:  The .22 Hornet.

    Factory loads in the .22 Hornet aren’t too useful for small game.  It’s a good 125-yard varmint round as factory-loaded, useful up to coyote-sized critters at those ranges, but factory loads do too much damage on small game.  But loaded with (again) a hard-cast lead bullet at moderate velocities, it becomes a great round for rabbits, hares, squirrels and marmots.  I keep one, a Ruger #3, as a fall turkey rifle; with the same kind of loads it will put down a big turkey inside of 100 yards right now.  And here’s the fun part:  If you have a good .22 Hornet rifle but would really, really like a .25-20 for the tad extra bullet diameter or just because you want one, you could have a barrel made; the two cartridges share a case head.  But that sounds like an expensive proposition.

    Let’s face it; in today’s small-game rifle world, rimfires are where it’s at, and there’s no sign of that changing any time soon.

    Accurate but heavy. Oops.

    I won’t discuss the various .17 rimfires, as I’ve never owned or shot one.  I’ll leave the well-informed readers to discuss those in the comments.  There are at present several .22LR rifles kicking around the gun rack at the Casa de Animal, but the one I set up for just such precision shooting, I kind of ended up outsmarting myself; I did the full-blown Ruger 10-22 conversion, with a .920” target barrel, a laminated Fajen thumbhole stock and a big target scope; the rifle shoots like a dream but weighs as much as many a big-game rifle.  A .22 should be light and handy.

    But while the .22 Long Rifle and the .22 WMR are both well-suited for most small-game work, the .22 WMR is more versatile.  Why?  Because the .22WMR will handle game up to the size of big marmots, foxes and at close ranges, coyotes.  The .22LR would not be advisable for larger animals like those, even with precise shot placement.

    That doesn’t mean the .22LR rifle isn’t great for most small game.  Back in the day my friends and I killed a whole bunch of rabbits and squirrels with .22LR rifles; ammo was cheap and plentiful, and so were the guns.  But even out of a rifle, it runs a tad on the weak side for the big hares, marmots and foxes, even with the high-velocity hollow-point rounds.  That’s where the .22WMR shines, as the 40-grain jacketed hollow-point will easily kill big hares, foxes and marmots out to about a hundred yards, and with the full-jacket solid loads available, it won’t mess up too much meat on smaller game.  Find you a rifle for either cartridge that’s light, easy to carry and accurate.  The Ruger 10-22 is available everywhere and they’re great shooters.  The famous old Marlin 60 is cheaper, and millions have been made.  There are far too many options to talk about here.  Look around!

    But it’s not always easy or convenient to tote around a rifle, even a .22, so let’s talk about…

    Handguns

    Something that seems to have fallen out of the shooting world is the “kit gun,” usually a small-frame .22 revolver intended for taking small game at short range.  The Smith & Wesson .22-32 Kit Gun was one such.  There are many good examples; I keep a Colt Officer’s Target in .22LR for such things, and it’s seen a fair amount of use on early-season mountain grouse here in Colorado, where we routinely plink dumb young birds out of trees with .22 handguns.  The old Colt is fussy about ammo, preferring CCI Green Tags above anything else, but with those it puts down grouse and rabbits handily without destroying too much meat if head shots aren’t possible.

    Colt Officer’s Target and Colorado Dusky Grouse

    But here’s the cool thing about handguns:  Most of them up to the .357 Mag will do great on even small stuff like rabbits, with the right load.  A .44/45 will work if you go for head shots, but the smaller guns are even good for body shots on rabbits and grouse with FMJ or hard lead pills.  A .357 loaded with .38 wadcutters is great for rabbit-sized game; a 9mm with FMJ bullets will kill quickly without messing up too much meat.  Find a moderate load with a non-expanding bullet and you’re set for opportunity shots at small game.  The .32 centerfires are great, too, and happily there has been something of a renaissance in .32 revolvers lately.

    As with anything handgun-related, the gun that’s most useful is the one you can shoot well.

    But the most versatile small game gun has yet to be discussed, so let’s move on to…

    Shotguns

    Short answer:  You can’t go wrong with a 12-gauge pump shotgun.  With that said, there are always other options, but let’s talk about the good old 12-gauge pump first.

    You might ask: “Why a 12-gauge, and why a pump gun?”  Well, I’ll tell you; there are two main reasons.

    1. Availability of ammo. 12-gauge shells are ubiquitous.  You can get ammo from 2 ¾” light trap loads to 3 ½” Roman candles, in every shot size known to man.  You can get mil-spec or 3” mag buckshot, slugs, and oddball shells like Dragon’s Breath.  The versatility of available 12-gauge factory ammo makes it the obvious choice.
    2. Ruggedness, reliability and versatility. Pump-guns are tough, easy to operate, and not prone to the fussiness about ammo that affects some semi-autos.  If you’re a southpaw, you can find an Ithaca 37 or a Browning BPS that features bottom ejection, so you don’t have spent shells flying across your field of vision.  There are literally millions of new and used pump shotguns available, which makes them something of an obvious choice.

    I’m something of a fan of the 16 gauge, and the 20 is still widely available and a good choice for kids or the small-framed, but if you can only own one shotgun, buy a 12.  If you can only own one gun, buy a 12-gauge pump-gun.

    Citori and Mountain Quail

    No matter what the gauge, the key to various types of small game is selecting the right choke, load and shot size.  Look here:

    • Quail/grouse/doves: Low-base loads, 7 ½ or 8 shot (AA trap loads are great here.)  An improved-cylinder choke is enough for what is normally close shooting on quail and grouse, but open-country doves require an Improved-Modified or Full choke.
    • Pheasant/rabbit/partridge: 2 ¾” field loads, 5 or 6 shot.  Modified, Improved-Modified chokes are best.
    • Hares/late season pheasant/sage grouse: 3” magnums, 4 or 5 shot.  Choke as above.
    • Spring turkey: 3 or 3 ½” magnums, buffered 4 or 6 shot.  Most spring turkey hunters favor tight chokes, and there are quite a few full and extra-full specialty turkey choke tubes floating around the market.

    There are special cases for waterfowl, but that’s probably a discussion for another day.

    Now, there are other guns than pump guns, of course.  Lots of folks prefer semi-autos, and the newer guns are more versatile than, say, the old Browning Auto-5 with its bearing bands that had to be reversed when moving from light to heavy loads.  Doubles are still popular, and few shotguns handle as sweetly as a well-balanced side-by-side or over-under; and almost no guns are as beautiful as a well-made, engraved side-by-side stocked with a nice piece of walnut.  And if your budget is tight, single-shots can be had for under a hundred bucks.

    Now, if you are in a place where you must be quiet…

    Air Guns

    Air guns have come a long way since the Crosman pump-up BB gun I toted around when my age was still in single digits.  In fact, if you read up on the Lewis & Clark expedition, they had come a long way before that, but let’s focus on today.

    Air guns have a few things going for them.  Ammo Is cheap; they can be purchased in most civilized places without all the Imperial foo-fraw about background checks and associated paperwork; they are quiet, which can be advantageous for discreetly disposing of pests in a built-up area.  A good air gun for small game should be able to deliver 600fps or better with either a .177 or .22 lead pellet; I prefer the .22 but either will work OK on squirrel/rabbit sized game at short range.  A good pump-up pellet pistol can be handy for discreet things as well, say if you have some bedraggled, exhausted house finches dragging baby cowbirds twice their size to your feeder.  Now, it’s illegal to shoot the nest-bandit cowbirds and their freeloading offspring.  I’m not saying I would use an inaudible, discreet pellet pistol to quietly dispose of such a pest.  But if I were to do so, a pump-up .22 caliber pellet pistol would sure get the job done.

    Trapping

    Big Game seasons can result in freezing your ass off.

    This is just a tad off-topic, but trapping can be fun and even somewhat profitable, although not as profitable as it was back in the Seventies when I trapped every winter; the decline in popularity of fur garments and the rise of farmed furs, which are more consistent in color and quality, has led to a crash in wild fur prices.  But trapping can be a good way to get small game in a survival situation.  A steel trap or coil of snare wire has a big advantage over, say, a .22LR or 12-gauge shotgun cartridge; you can catch an edible critter in a trap, clean and re-set the trap and use it again.  Once a round of ammo is expended, it’s expended.

    When I was a little tad back in Allamakee County, Iowa, shortly after the Earth’s crust finished hardening, I kept myself in .22 shells and pizzas by running a trapline in the winter.  Mostly muskrats and raccoons but the occasional fox or mink; I never focused much on trapping edible game (although raccoon ain’t bad stewed), but the principles involved in trapping, say, rabbits, are pretty much the same.

    Maybe I’ll write up an article on trapping sometime.

    Conclusions

    Small game hunting is loads of fun.  Seasons are measured in months instead of days or weeks, which means you can be a little choosier about the weather you want to deal with.  Bag limits are often generous, you can bring in some healthy, free range, additive-free, low-fat protein, and spend plenty of time out in the great wide open.  Licenses are cheaper.  And these days, in our increasingly shut-in, urbanized population, competition for game isn’t all that tough.

    Find you a good shotgun and bring in some bunnies or birds.  You won’t regret it.

  • Good Reads For Gun Folks

    In my forty-odd years of being a shooting sports aficionado, I’ve learned that like me, most gun nuts like reading about guns and shooting sports almost as much as they like the sports themselves.  The explosion of the Information Revolution has resulted in a plethora of scribes talking about guns and shooting, but back in the old days of paper and ink, the market was a lot tighter.

    Nevertheless, the shooting scene saw some great gun scribes from a variety of backgrounds.  We had cops and cowboys, hunters and target shooters, and some of them were prolific writers.  Like must gun cranks, I had my favorites.

    So here they are, in some sort of particular order.

    Jack O’Connor (1902-1978)

    Jack O’Connor with a mountain sheep.

    Jack O’Connor was probably the Dean of American gun writers.  One of my favorite bits of his work was an article for Outdoor Life titled “Moose Are Too Big,” in which he described being on an Alaskan trip when he was asked to help find and kill a moose for camp meat.  The story revolved not around the hunt but the ordeal of dressing, quartering, boning and packing out hundreds of pounds of moose meat, about which O’Connor expressed a preference for birds: “You can shoot a quail, put it in your pocket and go find another.”

    O’Connor did nevertheless spend much of his career hunting big game.  He was an early advocate for the .270 Winchester cartridge for game up to and including elk, emphasizing the importance of marksmanship and shot placement over raw power.  (Not that you can’t have both.)

    O’Connor’s books include:

    • Game in the Desert
    • Hunting in the Rockies
    • Sporting Guns
    • The Rifle Book
    • Hunting with a Binocular
    • Sportsman’s Arms and Ammunition Manual
    • The Big-Game Rifle
    • Jack O’Connor’s Gun Book
    • The Outdoor Life Shooting Book
    • The Complete Book of Rifles and Shotguns
    • The Big Game Animals of North America
    • Jack O’Connor’s Big Game Hunts
    • The Shotgun Book
    • The Art of Hunting Big Game in North America
    • Horse and Buggy West: A Boyhood on the Last Frontier
    • The Complete Book of Shooting
    • The Hunting Rifle
    • Rifle and Shotgun Shooting Basics
    • Sheep and Sheep Hunting
    • Game in the Desert Revisited
    • The Best of Jack O’Connor
    • The Hunter’s Shooting Guide
    • Hunting Big Game
    • The Last Book: Confessions of an Outdoor Gun Editor
    • Hunting on Three Continents with Jack O’Connor

    Elmer Keith (1899-1984)

    Keith’s autobiography, a crackin’ good read.

    Elmer Keith was a prolific gun writer; his book Sixguns is a personal favorite of mine, having survived the test of time to still be one of the best all-around books on revolvers and revolver shooting available.  His biggest claim to fame in the shooting world is probably his role in the creation of the .44 Magnum cartridge, which was based on heavy .44 Special loads he devised for the N-frame Smith & Wesson revolvers.  He was a fan of the Smith & Wesson Triple Lock, calling it the “finest revolver ever devised,” and Keith was an early convert to Bill Ruger’s placing modern lockwork and sights on the classic American single-actions, resulting in the now-classic Ruger Blackhawk.  On hunting rifles, he was a staunch advocate of big guns; he co-developed the .333 OKH wildcat and was an early proponent of the .338 Winchester Magnum.

    Funny thing; Jack O’Connor and big-gun advocate Elmer Keith were contemporaries in the American shooting scene, but they held differing views on hunting rifles and sidearms and cordially (and sometimes not-so-cordially) detested each other for many years.

    Keith’s books include:

    • Sixgun Cartridges and Loads
    • Big Game Rifles and Cartridges
    • Keith’s Rifles for Larger Game
    • Elmer Keith’s Big Game Hunting
    • Shotguns
    • Sixguns
    • Guns and Ammo for Hunting Big Game, with John Lachuk.
    • Safari
    • Keith, An Autobiography
    • Hell, I Was There (autobiography)

    Townsend Whelen (1877-1961)

    Whelen’s “On Your Own in the Wilderness.”

    (Army) Colonel Whelen is best known for his experiments on wildcat rounds based on the then-standard military-issue rifle cartridge, the Caliber .30, Model of 1906.  The .35 Whelen was accorded legitimacy by Remington some years back, but his other efforts, including the .25 Whelen, .375 Whelen and the .400 Whelen never gained much traction, although the .25-06 wildcat that became the .25-06 Remington was very similar to the .25 Whelen.

    While Colonel Whelen wrote several books, my favorite of his works appeared in Outdoor Life around 1910 and described a several-months adventure he embarked on with a friend, a saddle horse and pack horse each, a rifle each, plenty of ammo and his buddy’s dog.  Red-Letter Days in British Columbia is a must-read for any outdoor nut.

    Whelen’s books include:

    • Suggestions to Military Riflemen
    • The American Rifle
    • Telescopic Rifle Sights
    • The Hunting Rifle
    • Small Arms and Ballistics
    • Hunting Big Game (of which he was the editor)
    • Amateur Gunsmithing
    • Why Not Load Your Own?

    Col. Charles Askins, Jr (1907-1999)

    Can’t really add much to that title.

    You’ve got to love a guy whose autobiography is entitled Unrepentant Sinner.  (Dammit, he stole my title.)  Askins had two careers, one in the U.S. Army and one in the Border Patrol, and claimed at least 27 men killed in armed combat, which is probably nearly a record in the 20th century.  So, when it comes to the deployment of a sidearm in combat, he knew of whence he wrote.  He was something of an unsavory character, claiming at one point in his later years that he hunted game because he was no longer allowed to hunt men, but his survival in some nasty environments speaks volumes of his skills with a firearm.

    Askins’ books include:

    • Hitting the Bull’s-Eye
    • The Art of Handgun Shooting
    • Wing and Trap Shooting
    • The Pistol Shooter’s Book
    • Unrepentant Sinner: The Autobiography of Col. Charles Askins
    • The Gunfighters: True Tales of Outlaws, Lawmen, and Indians on the Texas Frontier
    • Shotgun-ology: A Handbook of Useful Shotgun Information
    • The African Hunt
    • Asian jungle, African Bush
    • The Shotgunner’s Book – A Modern Encyclopedia
    • Texans, Guns & History
    • The Federalist

    Bill Jordan (1911-1977)

    Bill Jordan demonstrating the quick draw.

    Bill Jordan’s book on handgun combat, No Second Place Winner, was the result of his long career as a lawman.  He was also a Marine, with service in WW2 and Korea, leaving the Corps with the rank of Colonel.

    Jordan was a lawman back when lawmen was not the visored, armored paramilitary forces we see in our cities today; his armor was a shirt, his only recourse against bad guys was a holstered revolver and cuffs.  He was a master with the double-action revolver, once having been recorded drawing, firing and hitting his target in .28 seconds – and he instructed James Arness in fast-draw techniques for Arness’ role as Marshall Dillon in Gunsmoke.  Jordan’s thoughts on guns in general and combat handguns in particular are still worth reading.

    Jordan’s books include:

    • No Second Place Winner
    • Mostly Huntin’
    • Tales of the Rio Grande

    Warren Page (1910-1977)

    While the saying “only accurate rifles are interesting” is bandied about a lot and is frequently named a quote from Townsend Whelen, it’s originally attributed to Warren Page, and few have done as much to spread the cause of accurate rifles than he did.

    Gun Greats: Norm Williams, Bill Ruger, Warren Page, Joyce Hornady and Clyde Willey.

    Page was responsible for the greatest name ever for a wildcat rifle cartridge; he took the old .244 Remington case and blew it out to a 28-degree shoulder and called it the .240 Page Souper Pooper.  It was a good round, largely eclipsed now in wildcatting circles by the .243 Improved.

    Page’s books include:

    • The Accurate Rifle
    • One Man’s Wilderness

    Col. Jeff Cooper (1920-2006)

    The Browning/Colt 1911 pistol never had a more ardent advocate than Jeff Cooper.  A retired Marine, Cooper also promoted the use of the rifle, stating in his book The Art of the Rifle, “…the rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.”  That’s a good point lost on all too many folks today, but Colonel Cooper was a man of a simpler time.

    Colonel Cooper also coined the term hoplophobia, meaning to have an irrational fear of gadgetry – especially weapons.

    Colonel Cooper making a couple of points.

    Cooper’s books include:

    • Principles of Personal Defense
    • Another Country: Personal Adventures of the Twentieth Century
    • C Stories
    • Fire Works
    • Shotluck
    • To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth
    • The Art of the Rifle
    • The Modern Technique of the Pistol
    • Yukon Journal
    • A Man in Full
    • Cooper on Handguns
    • Handguns Afield
    • Guns of the Old West
    • Fighting Handguns
    • Custom Rifles

    Honorable Mention:  Denis McLoughlin (1918-2002)

    Denis McLoughlin was not, strictly speaking, a gun writer.  But if you’re interested in the Old West, his book Wild & Woolly – An Encyclopedia of the Old West is an essential reference.  Ever wondered what Valley Tan was and where it originated?  Heard of the Dog Soldiers but weren’t sure who they were?  Don’t know who Annie Moses, Martha Jane Cannary, Alfred Swartz or Melvin King were?  Wild & Wooly will tell you.  Ever wondered where the Llano Estacado, Inscription Rock or the Mormon Trail were?  Ah, but Denis McLoughlin has the answer!  Funny thing is, he was a Brit.

    Reading about guns isn’t as much fun as shooting them.  But imagine the ammo costs if you spent as much time shooting as you can be reading.  Take a browse through any of the authors listed here; you won’t be disappointed.  Read, and enjoy!