Dispatches from a Northern Town

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
and gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak’ a right gude-willie waught,
for auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

            From the traditional Scots folk tune
            Auld Lang Syne, by Robert Burns (1759-96)

(First posted New Year’s Eve 2014)

For Auld Lang Syne

Come New Year’s Eve, I will honor my Scots heritage by taking a cup in friendship, singing Auld Lang Syne, and reminiscing about times, people and places gone by. While the clock ticks the final minutes toward midnight, symbolic ending of one year and beginning of another, I will sit by the woodstove with my wife and some friends, wineglasses in hand and a pair of sleeping bird dogs at our feet, and allow myself some melancholy thoughts about the torrent of tears and laughter that has tumbled me through more than five decades afield in the North Country.

Yes, I know that life is best lived in the present. Today, this moment, is the only time we really have. We risk losing our enjoyment and appreciation of this day, this precious time, if we too often dwell on the past (whether with regret or gratification) or incessantly look toward the future (whether with anxiety or hope).

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Compared to the artillery pieces we used to lug into the grouse woods in our 20s and 30s, the shotguns of the Over the Hill Gang are now featherweights. More proof that bird hunters “get too soon old and too late smart.”

Boy, you’re going to carry that weight,
Carry that weight a long time.
  – from the Beatles song Carry That Weight, released on the Abbey Road album in 1969, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

In making most grouse shots, especially in the brush, to the grip-hand and the wrist fall the duty of starting the gun into shooting position. If, at the end of a long day, the shooter can with one hand slap his gun into shooting position, he need not worry about being over-burdened, but if he cannot do this he is carrying too much gun…
  — from New England Grouse Hunting by William Harnden Foster (1886-1941), upland shooting writer, dog trainer, the laureate of ruffed grouse hunting and a principal in the development of grouse dog field trials

Carry that weight

The worries and cares of mortal life weigh heavily upon us all. So do shotguns, more so in our sixth decade afield than our second.

Reducing the weight of my field guns has become an obsession in recent years. Long winter days are perilous times for my double guns because I cannot resist the urge to tinker with them. I can only shoot so many rounds of ghost skeet and phantom birds in the workshop before boredom brings out the demons who torment me with reminders of October and November bird hunting blunders, including the two grouse I missed in the northern Minnesota aspen forests because the heel of the gunstock of my Spanish-made double gun caught on my shooting vest when I tried to mount it, arm-weary at the end of a day’s hunt.

A bit of experimenting convinced me that problem could be solved by trimming a 3/8-inch-inch slice from the stock, reducing the length of pull to the front trigger to 14 1/8 inches. An afternoon of intense and meticulous labor with handsaw, sandpaper, steel wool, boiled linseed oil and a polishing cloth accomplished that goal. Now I am certain that next fall I will mount the gun quickly and smoothly and hit every ruffed grouse that flushes from under Abbey’s points. Probably. Maybe.

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The North Country is beautiful at Christmastime. Images of our Christmas Eve walk in the woods after a fresh blanket of snow covered our farm…

..and ended back at the farmhouse with feet up before a fire in the wood stove and a cup of hot coffee in hand.

Merry Christmas!

An Eastern Arms Company single-shot, break-action shotgun came down from the clubhouse wall to be reconfigured into a training shotgun for my grandsons to learn wing shooting skills. It patterns well on paper and breaks clay targets on our hillside range. We are ready for the summer games.

Woodworking gives me something useful to do when I’m feeling puny and it takes my mind off my troubles.
   – from the book Yellowstone Thunder by Gary McCarthy, American writer of historical novels and Westerns

I gouged the wood once with the belt sander but consoled myself by recalling that the mark of a true craftsman is his ability to hide his errors.
   – Clement Seagrave, outdoor writer and novice woodworker

Eastern Arms Company project gun

My compulsion to “improve” the fit and performance of my shotguns began in west Texas about 35 years ago. Transplanted from the rolling country of northeast Nebraska to the flat, sandy plains of the Permian Basin, I discovered the heavy and cumbersome Fox Model B double gun that had served me well for shooting ring-necked pheasants in the cornfields and along the shelterbelts of Midwest farmlands was poorly suited to gunning coveys of bobwhite and scaled quail in the semi-arid land of the great Southwest. I missed too many shots at close-flushing birds, and those I did hit were often shredded by tight patterns of shot.

What I needed was a lighter, quicker, and more open-choked gun. What I did not have was money for a new double gun. So after reading and pondering advice from the shotgun writers Michael McIntosh and Gene Hill, I screwed up my courage and went to work on the Fox 12 gauge double with the intent of converting it to a passable quail gun. Back in those more innocent and ignorant days of my youth I did not yet know that my Fox gun was actually a Savage-Stevens “hardware trade gun” of coarse design and sturdy but crude manufacture. To me it was a thing of great beauty and utility, so setting upon it with drill, grinder, saws, chisels, files, and belt sander was a leap of faith into a new era of shotgun maintenance.

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