David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

In the early 1950s the African professional hunter Alexander Lake wrote about an unsettling experience he had with a troop of baboons. Lake had been shooting them for bounty (they are hell on crops and young animals, and ranchers, farmers, and PHs hate them). Lake found himself unarmed in the middle of a troop of the beasts, face to face with the Alpha baboon who, rather than leading the troop in tearing Lake to pieces, stared into his eyes with, as Lake described it, a strange yearning look.

Then Lake heard a weak squawk, and saw a mother baboon nearby, hovering near her baby, which was limp and obviously near death. It had been poisoned by a farmer. Lake had a canteen filled with strong coffee and forced some into the little beast. It puked up whatever it had eaten and began breathing regularly. The momma baboon grabbed her youngster and the troop faded back into the forest. Lake never forgot that strange, beseeching look in the Alpha baboon’s eyes, and he never shot another one.

Last summer, in South Africa, I found out first hand what Lake was writing about. We’ve all watched the eyes of shot animals as they die. One instant they are bright and seeing and in the next instant they are clouded and unfocused and the life has left them. I had never seen anything different until I shot a big male baboon and walked over to him. As he lay there, his eyes locked into mine and I saw something that might have been incomprehension or recognition or accusation or perhaps all three. I will never know.

In any event, I don’t think I will shoot another baboon, either.

Two weeks ago, I showed up at a South Carolina plantation to hunt whitetails. The owner, a hunter of vast experience as well as a person of the highest literary and moral worth, asked me what rifle I had brought. I said a plain-vanilla .270, and his reaction was as though I had announced I was a descendant of William Tecumseh Sherman, or that I carried a turd in my pocket for company.       

The .270, he said, was notorious for letting deer escape, even fatally shot ones, and this was not only his experience but that of the owner of a nearby plantation who had kept careful records over many years.       
As it was, I killed four deer, all lung shots, one shot each. One dropped in her tracks; the other three ran 50, 75, and 30 yards, which is about average. I've been hunting whitetails in South Carolina since 1983. In that time I've used everything from a .257 Roberts to a 7mm Weatherby magnum and a great deal in between. I have not seen any evidence that one cartridge killed any quicker than another. My experience is that most deer (probably 70 percent) go on a last mad dash before piling up. I've never seen one go more than 100 yards, and very few have gone that far. I don't believe they run with any destination in mind; they only run.     

As the late Finn Aagaard pointed out, deer will go as long as there is any oxygen in their brain; when that runs out it's all over, and they can absorb the most horrendous damage and still cover ground. The moral is, shoot good and keep looking. None of my four deer left a blood trail, but they were found almost immediately. One time, I was around when a very good hunter shot a very good Alabama buck and it took a day and a half to find the animal. It would have been easy to quit, but the hunter didn't. Neither should you.

This past Sunday, I watched the Jets’ 47-3 disembowelment of the Rams, and one play stuck in my mind. Bret Favre (who is a hunter, by the way) rolled out to the right and, ignoring the four 315-pound life forms who wanted his blood, waited for what seemed an incredible length of time before he zinged the ball right between a St. Louis defensive back’s hands and into the hands of his own receiver.

A less experienced quarterback would have panicked and thrown an interception, or eaten the ball, or tried to run and got nailed, but Favre, who has done this a lot, knew how much time he had down to the hundredth of a second.

So it is with big game hunting. There are situations when you have to shoot right now and situations when you can take can take your sweet time. Beginners never seem to get it right. They will panic, throw the rifle to their shoulder, and fill the air with lead. Or they will fuss and fidget and aim, and aim, and aim, and in the meanwhile, the critter will get bored and leave.

A veteran hunter will know from years of watching animals and studying their body language, just how much time he has. Usually it’s more than you would think, and it increases with the distance between you and the victim-to-be. Whitetails, for example, have a distinct facial expression when things are not to their liking. It looks like a frown. Years ago, sitting in a rhododendron patch on a West Virginia hillside, I was approached by a doe and a fawn. The doe was perhaps 10 feet away, and there were enough of my scent molecules in the air to cause her concern. The expression on her face was that of a Detroit automobile industry executive pondering his/her future. Then she got the full load of essence de Petzal and ran like hell.

They study us, too. In 1981, I was hunting sable in Zambia, and the instant the big antelope saw me and the PH they would go thundering off in a cloud of dust and sable s**t. After I killed one, we practically had to kick them out of the way to get to other animals. Most herbivores can tell what our intentions are, so try to adopt a non-threatening demeanor when in the woods, and take your time aiming. But not too much time.

These come from Tom McIntyre, who writes for Field & Stream but is not related to Reba. The photo was taken in France or Turkey or one of those places. The swine appears to have fainted. In any event, it is a pile of pork and a heap of ham no matter how you slice it. -- DP

I have an unnatural fascination with prehistoric man and, like a lot of paleontologists, spend time wondering what killed off the Neanderthals. They were around for 260,000 years in the face of some of the worst weather the earth has experienced, but 2,000 to 10,000 years after Cro-Magnons showed up, they vanished. Neanderthals lived in small family groups, and bit by bit, the groups ceased to exist. Finally, it probably came down to one man or woman, and that must have been the loneliest death imaginable.

I'm sure that last Neanderthal's last thought, just before his (or her) heart stopped was "Screw it. Why bother anymore? There's no one left."

And so it is with hunters. Hunting and shooting are intensely tribal. Only another hunter or shooter can understand what we do, and we tend to hang around with hunters and shooters of our own age. The pissant punks who can't remember before GPS and Gore-Tex and laser rangefinders will never understand how older generations view things.

Eventually, you reach the point  where you look around and there is no one left who remembers the things you do. Unlike the poor damned Neanderthal, you may not decide to die, but you very well may decide to hang up your guns. If you have no one left to share your sport with, why bother anymore?

I spoke yesterday with an old friend who has been a big-game hunter and a gun nut of the first magnitude since the 1950s. He’s been using top-rank custom rifles for half a century, and owns what is probably the finest privately-held collection of modern and antique firearms in the United States. I have not seen his battery, but a friend of mine who knows what he’s looking at has, and says it’s beyond belief.

Anyway, he just got back from a brown bear hunt in Alaska, and I asked him which rifle he used.

“A Ruger Mark II stainless steel .338 with a synthetic stock. The only thing I did to it was replace the lousy trigger. It shoots minute of angle or better. I don’t hunt with the good stuff any more.”

And neither do you need to. You can put away your Al Biesen and your Jerry Fisher and D’Arcy Echols and David Miller rifles; send them into honorable retirement. What with the airlines the way they are these days, it ain’t worth the risk.

There are very few things I believe in absolutely anymore, but one of them is, if you want to see what someone is really made of, go big-game hunting with them. There is something about the combination of wilderness, physical effort, the high likelihood of failure, and the constant presence of Murphy (he of the law) that brings out the best and worst in people.

Those who reveal themselves to be prize s***s will usually do so when someone else shoots something really terrific--particularly if that person is a beginner, or inept, or otherwise undeserving. You will see an instant personality change in the prize s**t. He will cease speaking, keep to himself, snap at his fellows, and insult the undeserving nimrod.

"Pure luck," he will say, or "Did you know what you had when you pulled the trigger?", or "You'd never do that again in a million years."

The other condition that turns some people into prize s***s is BEING OUT OF TOUCH, or its corollary, NOT BEING IN CONTROL OF EVENTS. When they discover that their Blackberrys and cell phones are no longer functional, they come unglued. They are the ones who go stomping through the woods, cell in hand, trying to find a few bars, wondering what is going on, and how the earth is managing to spin on its axis without their constant input.

Years ago, Gary Sitton and I were on a trail ride in western Montana, taking in some of the most wonderful scenery on earth. On the horses ahead of us rode two younger men, jabbering nonstop about computers. Gary and I just smiled at each other; we knew we were in the presence of fools.

Two years ago, just after our beloved Vice President shot a fellow quail hunter in the face, I found myself explaining to a couple of non-hunting friends just how such a thing could occur. Quail hunting, I said, is a sport in which things happen very quickly and often don't go the way you expect. I told them that quail often fly toward you, or between shooters, or that dogs jump at the birds, and that all things considered, in 40 years of hunting quail, I'd probably held off firing as many times as I'd shot.

I've also walked off hunts and away from shoots where I thought the participants might blow my head off. Many years ago, at a shoot put on for gun writers by what was then a major firearms maker, the genius running the affair put a brand-new shooter in the number one spot on a trap squad with four very experienced shooters. I was in the number two spot. A fast trap squad can unhinge some people, and it unhinged this guy. He put a shot into the ground right in front of me; a foot closer and I would have had no foot.

I didn't yell at him but I did yell at some length at the guy who put him there and then I walked off the squad. I've also walked off a quail hunt in Texas, and off a whitetail drive on a cottonwood island in Montana, and off a nilgai hunt in Texas after the hunter behind me sent a rifle bullet past my head.

If you would like to see the kind of stuff you should walk away from, take a look at this video clip. Despite its intent, it ain't funny. These clowns could have shot themselves or someone else. I would not stay within a mile of morons like these.

"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?