by Mengro - The Road Scholar
Being a bit long in the tooth and also having grown up in a very remote and sparsely populated region of the country, I'm sure things have
changed much since I was a kid. Now, the world can seem like an ugly place but back then, ... well, it does seem a little like paradise by
comparison.
When I was a little kid, my father used to take me out shooting. He let me use the .22
rim fire. It was bought at Western Auto (remember those?). The brand was their own Westernfield. It had a 4x scope. We went out
and shot a lot, my dad pretending to hunt--right! With my noisy footsteps? No, he was just pretending to hunt so I could learn.
That was all very good but by the time I was 10 or 11, I decided I wanted to get my own gun. I asked my dad. He must have thought it was
reasonable and he looked at my mum for approval. "No! God no!" she said. God, I was deflated ... but then I did what I usually did in such
situations. I snuck ... and made a point not to get caught. I got a paper route and made some really decent money, saving it,
scrooge-like.
When I had enough money, I went down to the local sporting goods store. I decided on a gun combination shotgun/rifle. It was a single shot,
broke in the middle, and had three barrels combined into one. One was a .410 shotgun, another was a .30-30 rifle, and the other was a .22
rim fire. The storeowner told me he couldn't sell it to me without my parents. I told him who my father was and that he had a small business
of his own, never liking to work for others. I told him my dad was too busy to come with me but told me to tell him it was "ok."
He looked me in the eye and I looked back, never flinching. I held the cash in hand and fanned it a bit. Then I said, it could be next week
before he can find time to come down here with me. After a minute, I folded the bills up and then he bit. He said, "Ok, have him call me."
Then he took the cash, gave me the gun, and I went on my way. I never mentioned it to my dad, but now as an adult looking back, I'd bet that
storekeeper called my dad when he didn't hear anything. And just like my dad, he never let on that he knew.
I lived in a small town and it was only a 10 minute walk before getting into cow pastures and woods. I had a canoe too. I'd "found" it in the
river. The spring floods had washed it downstream and I salvaged it from a borrowed boat. I'm sure it belonged to someone. It was a 16' Kennebec
wood and canvas canoe worth thousands today. But as a kid, I figured I'd found it. Still, I hid it well, just in case. The only walking route to
it was to walk along the railroad bed through some pretty awful stuff and near the trestle over the river was a bit of high ground surrounded by
the river and the old bed of the river.
Near where I kept the canoe on this sort of island, there was a big maple tree and like many maples it had heart rot. There was a big hollow and I
wrapped my gun up in a waterproof tarp and slid it up into the tree hollow. I used to go out after school or during school if I was skipping
and take the gun and the canoe and pole the canoe upstream quite a ways. When I got to a favorite bit of woods, I'd land the canoe, take my little
breech loading combo and head off to my cabin I built. It was next to a tiny spring and really I could and did spend many days and a few nights
there, hunting, fishing, lazing about. I cooked my catch over a campfire and my dad had shown me how to build a fire and then make a little oven
with a couple of pans, put a potato in it, build a little fire on top, and when I came back, I'd have a nice baked potato.
One of my favorite resources was the dump. I know today that seems kind of filthy but we really seldom came home from the dump with less than we
took there. Just like today, people would throw out perfectly good stuff that needed only a tiny repair or just cleaning and so I'd pick up lots
of useful items, refurbish them, and furnished my cabin with these items.
When they finally caught me writing my own notes for school, they told me I had the record. No one had ever skipped so much school in that town
and got away with it so long. Those were the days that I remember fondly, certainly not the many long days I spent looking out the
classroom window after that.
I can't remember if the gun was a Stevens but perhaps it might have been. I can tell you that I took a lot of game with it--ok I poached a lot of
small game--but I was just a kid--and I ate everything I killed. Sometimes I would put a ratshot load into the .30-30, a #8 in the .410,
and in the .22 I would file groves into the bullet to make it break up like the ratshot load they have now for the little
rim fire. I didn't want to take a deer or anything big because I had no way to keep it in my
cabin and it would be wasted.
Another great feature about the gun was that I could break it in half and put the two halves together, wrap it up, and it didn't look like a gun at
all so no one ever bothered me whenever I had to carry it through a place where other people might see me. It was really a great poacher's gun. A
single pop heard firing nearby is likely impossible to know where it came from. The single pop of a single shot gun or rifle would never bring the
police or the warden. It did teach me to take my time and aim carefully, however.
My favorite pack was a simple rucksack made from a waxed/oiled canvas I made. I could drop the gun in the pack, drop a hare or squirrel in it
too, and throw a jacket on over it and I just looked like any kid. Looking back, I find it amazing that my father never asked me why I
didn't come home for two days or whatever, but I guess that's how he grew up. He grew up on the Alagash river in far northern Maine in the big
wilderness when it was all virgin timber up there. He never had to sneak like I did, however. All kids had guns and knives and knew how to use
them.
Oh yeah, speaking of knives, that's another story. I'll tell it sometime.
