Plinking

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAPlink- vt. (plink; rhymes with sink) [slang, American]: to shoot informal targets such as tin cans with a small caliber rifle or handgun; the word ‘plink’ is an onomatopoeia of the sharp, metallic sound of a small caliber bullet hitting a tin can; n. the act or practice of plinking
       – Definition from North Country Dictionary of Essential Outdoor Vocabulary (Unpublished)

“DO NOT PLINK.”
      – Jeff Cooper (1920-2006), firearms instructor, creator of the ‘Modern Technique’ of handgun shooting, and a small arms expert

 “Plink as often as you can.”
       – Clement Seagrave, dedicated plinker, indifferent handgun marksman, and an expert at finding ejected brass cases

 Plinking

There may be some grandfather-grandson pastime that is more fun and instructive than plinking, but I doubt it.

There comes a time in the grandfather-grandson relationship when plinking is the ultimate sharing and bonding activity. Plinking brings out the adult in a ten-year-old and the child in a sixty-year-old. It is the outdoor sports skill that every grandson loves to learn and every grandfather loves to teach.

Continue reading →

Posted in farm humor, humor, Hunting, Hunting Humor, Outdoor humor, Rifle Shooting, Shooting, Shooting Sports | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Friends

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

Dedication page exampleI hope the day will be a lighter highway,
For friends are found on every road.
Can you ever think of any better way
For the lost and weary traveler to go?
 
It seems to me a crime that we should age,
These fragile times should never pass us by.
A time we never can or shall erase,
As friends together watch their childhood fly
 
Making friends for the world to see.
Let the people know you got what they need.
With a friend at hand you will see the light,
If your friends are there then everything’s all right.

            – From the song ‘Friends’ by Elton John

Friends

Once upon a time…

We were all going to be great writers: Donald Borchert, the novelist; Michael Shelton, the poet; and me, the short story writer. We were in college, The Ohio State University, and we lived in a duplex on Eleventh Avenue, about four blocks east of the OSU campus.

Those were wonderful days, wonderful in the sense of filled-with-wonder, not necessarily in the sense of fun-and-frolic. It was that era called the Sixties, the decade from about 1964-74 when the myth of America as the “good nation” was exposed as a hoax and the country came apart at the seams.

I cannot pretend to put into words the Alice-in-Wonderland madness of that time and place. The cliché, “You had to be there,” is valid. So is the saying, “If you remember the Sixties, you probably weren’t there.”

Continue reading →

Posted in friends, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Squck

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_0842This mud suction-trapped boot illustrates the first step in the traditional North Country ‘squck polka.’ Based on the Russian troika folk dance but performed one-legged with extemporaneous free-form interpretations, the squck polka ends with a lively whoop-and-sploosh maneuver in black, soupy goo.

 

Squck

Some years in the North Country the end of winter is a door slammed shut. One day the high temperature is three below zero, the next day it’s 52 above.

Three to four feet of accumulated snow and ice melt in less than a week, and the icy torrents of water fill the dry runs between the bluffs, flood the creeks, and swell the rivers to overflowing. It is a beautiful time of year, although a bit treacherous as ice hides just below an inch or two of soft surface. I love to sit on the deck in the late afternoon, cup of hot coffee in hand, listening to the meltwater race and roar through the draws on the east and south sides of the house.

Clearly, winter has ended, but spring has not really arrived. Except for the drifts and hard-packed driveway edges, the snow and ice are quickly disappearing, and the last of the icicles have dropped from the eaves to plunge spear-like into the thawing turf. But no shoots of green are emerging from the ground, trees are not budding out, that fragrant waft of spring scent is not in the air, and the dogs are not shedding their winter coats.

No longer winter, but, unfortunately, not yet spring. We have entered that North Country transition season that I call squck, so named because wherever I walk my feet sink into the water-mud-ice-snow mix that covers the farm, and each step is accompanied by the squck sound of rubber boot pulling away from the suction of the swampy ground. On afternoon walks, the tread of running dogs provides an double-time “splat-a-splat” accompaniment and a heavy spray of muddy water that accounts for the speckled look of my clothes and face this time of year.

Continue reading →

Posted in farm humor | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe bottom line is that the advantages of overloaded rounds are largely illusory. In practical fact, the bloody things aren’t worth either the expense or the discomfort. And they are discomfortable in the extreme.

So what good are 30 percent more pellets if they’re giving you less effective patterns, less efficient shooting, and beating the hell out of you to boot?

      – Michael McIntosh,
               “Cartridges: When Less is More,”
                from his book “Shotguns and Shooting”

The Charge of the Light Brigade

I call it “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” this shotshell load I take into battle against the troops of the “Heavy Field Artillery Regiment.”

16 gauge Fiocchi hull
Fiocchi 616 primer
18.2 grains of Hodgdon’s Universal powder
Ballistics Products 16 gauge sporting/field wad
1 ounce No. 7½ shot

First order of business: I do not assume any responsibility for your results if you choose to follow this shotshell recipe for target or light field loads for your shotgun. It performs wonderfully in my Lefever Nitro Special.

Muzzle velocity averages about 1,110 feet per second, according to tests with my shooting chrony. From both barrels, one choked improved-cylinder and the other light-modified, the patterns at thirty yards are uniform, even, and consistent.

Light loads. A loyal member of the Light Brigade, I am an advocate of light loads. As a result, I am constantly at war with Heavy Artillery boys.

Continue reading →

Posted in Bird hunting, Shooting, Shooting Sports, Shotguns, Shotshell Reloading | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Just for the hull of it

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_0820Shotshell hulls of many different brands and configurations show up in the reload pile, but I use only Winchester AA hulls. This is a narrow, biased, personal prejudice.  Forty-plus years of reloading has given me a terminal case of OFS (Old Fudd Syndrome), characterized by diminished ability to reason and increased irrational outbursts such as “I’ve always done it this way!” 

Just for the hull of it

The thermometer on the deck reads twelve degrees below zero on this sunny but “brisk” March morning in the North Country. The farm is covered by thirty-some inches of accumulated snow as we near the end of winter, and an Arctic wind is gusting at twenty miles per hour as I venture out in shirtsleeves with the dogs, cup of hot coffee in hand, to grab a chunk of red elm firewood for the stove.

In short, this is a perfect day to retreat to the warmth of the workshop and fuss with the shotshell hulls waiting to be reloaded.

Continue reading →

Posted in Shooting | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Project rifles

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

100_1295

“Only accurate rifles are interesting.”
          – Townsend Whelen (1877-1961),
                rifleman, hunter, soldier,
                outdoorsman and writer

Project rifles

Were it not for a long series of project rifles, I would probably be living a comfortable retired life in Monaco, relaxing on the terrace of a palatial house overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and wondering whether to drive the Ferrari or the Lamborghini to Paris for the weekend. Instead, I spend much of my time in a garage workshop, glancing every now and then at the boxes of discarded rifle barrels, bolts, trigger assemblies, stocks, scope mounts, recoil pads, various parts of disassembled actions, magazines, scope mounts, springs, screws, pins, and other odds and ends.

There lies the bulk of my discretionary income from the past forty years. The rest of it has been spent on bird dogs, bird guns, hunting trips, gear, clothes, licenses, pickup trucks, and to a lesser degree, beer. So, although my children are educated and my mortgage is paid off, I was never in the market for that retirement home in the south of France.

Continue reading →

Posted in Hunting, Hunting Humor, Shooting | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Touching The Wall

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

IMG_0813Touching The Wall

Touching “The Wall” – the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. – proved to be one of the most profound and most agonizing experiences of my life. We did not go to Washington solely for that purpose, but visiting The Wall to find the name of a childhood friend was among the things we set out to do during our week there.

Bobby Grooms, 1st Lt. Robert L. Grooms, was killed in Vietnam Sept. 12, 1971. He was 24 years old. The phrase “childhood friend” utterly fails to convey the person he was to me or the way in which he shaped my life.

Continue reading →

Posted in Baseball, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Skunks, Part 2: North Country Skunks

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

100_1268A skunked dog bath recipe that really works:

Two pints of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide
One-fourth cup of baking soda
One tablespoon of liquid dish washing detergent
One pair of sturdy rubber gloves
One gallon of water

Directions: put on the rubber gloves and mix together in the plastic bucket the hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish detergent. Using this foamy solution, lather the dog from nose to tail with a liberal and energetic washing. Let stand for five or six minutes, then rinse the dog with the gallon of water.

North Country Skunks

Sasha loves to catch skunks.

All of my bird dogs have caught at least one skunk. For most of them, one was enough. More than enough.

Susie, Molly, Herco, Jessie, Annie – they all tangled with a single skunk and decided it was a pleasure they could forego. Pete, an English springer spaniel of great hunting and retrieving ability but no mental giant, caught and killed three of them before his dim bulb of a brain established the cause-and-effect connection between the scent of skunk in the wild and the resultant three days of swollen-eyed blindness, vomiting, and discharge of gallons of dog-snot from nose and mouth.

Sasha, a French spaniel whose versatile breed background must include a generous helping of genes from fur-hunting dogs, loves the pursuit of skunks and has caught four so far.

Continue reading →

Posted in Bird Dogs, Bird hunting, Hunting, Hunting Humor, Wildlife | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Skunks and other Texas observations

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Jerry Johnson

Striped skunk - photo from Texas Parks and Wildlife Division websiteTexas has lots of skunks.  Skunks refers to the members of the mephitidae family of carnivorous mammals, not to Texas good ol’ boys, lawyers, land speculators, livestock rustlers, oil business tycoons, politicians, or preachers.  No, I am referring here to the dense population of striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis) and the supporting cast of four other species of skunk that call Texas their home.

 

Skunks and other Texas observations

As I write this essay, the North Country is in the grip of the most severe winter weather in thirty years or more. A series of Arctic weather fronts has brought temperatures of -20 degrees, some days even colder, and storms have covered the land with several feet of accumulated snow.

I know about this dreadful winter from checking the daily weather reports from my home town and reading the messages sent by friends who are trapped in that icebox. My arthritic old body has not suffered the pains and agonies of winter the past six weeks because my wife and I have escaped to the relative warmth of Texas.

Most days, this has seemed to be a good decision, but as with travel to any foreign country, an extended stay in Texas poses some challenges, language misunderstandings and unusual protocols of highway driving being the most common.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized, Wildlife | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Annie – too much dog

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Jerry Johnson
Too much dog

Too much dog

After twenty-five years experience raising, training and hunting English springer spaniels, I had the misguided belief that every dog had innate desire to bond with its owner, to become a loyal and affectionate partner, to work together as a team in the field, and to reminisce as a companion before the hearth. It took Annie, great teacher-by-example that she was, less than a year to disabuse me of that fallacy.

Annie – too much dog

Annie loved to hunt birds. She just didn’t like to hunt birds with me. If I were to admit an even harsher truth, I would say that Annie did not like me all that much and was tolerant of me only when we were afield in the fall and I had bird gun in hand.

Annie was a German shorthaired pointer, and she was possessed of all the irascible, obdurate, and contrary behaviors that characterize her breed. Plus the willful and defiant attitude specific to her personality. She rocked my confidence as a bird dog trainer and amateur canine psychologist. Over the course of eleven bird seasons, before I retired her, I recall eight or maybe nine great days of hunting together. Not a good percentage of our hundred or so ventures afield.

Continue reading →

Posted in Bird Dogs, Bird hunting, Hunting | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments