David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

"The only time I ever got my s**t together I couldn't pick it up." -- Roger Miller

A couple of years ago I was talking with Sandy Sallee  (who co-runs Black Mountain Outfitters in Montana) about their hunters' foibles, and she revealed that many of the 50- and 60-year-olds that Black Mountain guides for elk do a lot better physically than the 20- and 30-year-olds.

When the younger hunters find out how tough it is, she said, they sit in their tents all day. The geezers are used to suffering so they go out and ride from can to can't and freeze and sweat up mountains.

Being able to take it physically is a major part of real hunting, and I think a lot of it is mental. I've known four SEALS well enough to talk to, and every one of them was small (5' 5" to 5'7" and maybe 130 to 140 pounds), and to a man they said that there were people in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALS (SEAL boot camp) who were stronger, faster, and more enduring, but who washed out anyway because they couldn't hack it mentally.

Size does not necessarily work in your favor. I was once told by a Selous Scout (the Rhodesian Army equivalent of our Rangers) that the ideal size for a soldier was about 5'10" and 160 pounds. Bigger than that, he said, and your height and weight just worked against you. And I've heard the same thing from other military sources.

About the toughest case I've ever hunted with was a Canadian named James Minnerie, with whom I hunted moose in Alaska in 2006. James was 6 feet and 180 pounds, and the guy performed prodigious acts of strength and endurance all day long for 12 days on end. I watched him pack 60 pounds of moose meat through a bog that almost put me in a body bag, and he never took a deep breath.

I still wonder where they plugged him in at night.

I try hard not to believe in superstition, or lucky guns, lucky socks, hats, shirts, whatever, but sometimes I wonder. Five years ago I got a new turkey gun – a Mossberg 835 Grand Slam – and immediately my fortunes took a 180-degree turn for the better. Where I had been a stumbling idiot in the turkey woods in previous seasons, all of a sudden I was avian cholera in camo. Long-spurred public land turkeys lined up for the privilege of letting me shoot them with my new 835. I went on a five-year roll.

So, it was with a little concern this year that I left my old faithful Mossberg at home in favor of a new 870. On paper (both patterning paper and metaphorical paper) the 870 was the better gun. But, was I dooming my streak of punched tags?

Day after day, I carried the 870 through my most frustrating season in years . A freakish wet spring put most of my river bottom hunting grounds under water. The few high, dry spots crawled with hunters. Cold weather and hunting pressure screwed up the gobbling cycle. The couple of times I got on birds, I unerringly sat a few feet away from the right spot.

A week ago Monday was my final day to hunt. I agonized in front of the gun cabinet. Did I need to take my 835 to save the season? No such thing as lucky guns, I told myself, and reached for the 870. About 9:15 a 22 pound tom came 200 yards on a string, gobbling to every one of my calls. At 25 yards we saw one another. He stepped behind a tree to think things over, then turned to sneak away. I had to shoot fast at a quick glimpse of the head among the foliage. A single golden BB to the back of the skull laid the turkey out flat.

I told this story to Excecutive Editor Mike Toth who said “Of course there are lucky guns. You must have been keeping the 870 in the cabinet next to the 835 and the luck rubbed off.” Is Toth right? Who out there believes in lucky guns and who among you is fortunate enough to own one?

In the early part of the 20th century, Dr. Saxton Pope (one of the founders of modern bowhunting), became the caretaker of a Yahi Indian (the very last of his tribe) named Ishi, and got to watch a genuine subsistence hunter at work. Ishi, said Pope, was not a particularly good shot with a bow, nor were his bow and arrows very much, but what Ishi could do was sit and wait. It was uncanny how still he could remain, and for how long. After a while he would seem to melt into his surroundings, and any game he got a chance at would be taken from only a few yards.

Learning to sit still is one of the great pleasures in hunting. In some places, it's the only viable method. But it's also difficult to acquire the discipline to sit truly still. Years ago in South Carolina I was on a hunt where I shot lots of deer and no one else shot any, and there was ugly talk about the Field & Stream bastard getting the best stands. But it wasn't that at all.

I had learned by then that these deer were highly clued in, and would watch a stand from the woods before coming out into the open, and that sitting still did not include nose picking, scratching, yawning, lifting one cheek to fart, stretching, moving your rifle, or anything else.

I think that if you can sit truly still you can go into the woods wearing purple, lime green, mauve, and Prussian blue and you will still fool the animals because they see movement, not color. And the other benefit of sitting corpse-like is that all the other beasts of the field forget you're there, and you get to watch all sorts of critters going about their lives. Sometimes that's such a good show that you forget all about what you're there for.