Drive - A Memoir 47th Installment
was
about zero degrees, but the sun was brilliant and there wasn’t any
wind to drive a chill factor. Still, it was hard to sit still in the
arctic cold very long. Russ was coming slowly, his arms full
balancing the two guns, the two clubs, his gloves which he hadn’t
put on yet because he had a piece of toast in his mouth, and a cup of
hot chocolate. Mumbling through the chunk of toast, “why don’t
you help carry all this stuff instead of sitting on the tractor
throne like ‘king for a day’?”
I
should have said ‘you’re right I’ll help’ because he was
right; instead I yelled, “Why don’t you shut up!”
At
the first hay stack Russ said, “Look at that – there are a bunch
of jackrabbits in the fence.” Then as we got closer, he continued,
“STOP!” “Some of the jackrabbits are outside the fence still
looking to get in.”
“Yeah,
I see them,” I brought the tractor to a standstill and shut it off.
“We ‘shoot um or lose ‘um!” The jackrabbits didn’t scatter
into the desert because they spook with movement and not noise. We
slowly readied our rifles and positioned ourselves for shooting.
“You
take the two in front and the ones at the west end, and I’ll get
the east end,” he ordered. “Shoot when you’re ready.”
Pop,
pop, pop, pop, it was like a shooting gallery, and it was over in
twenty seconds. A few were stone dead, some were still kicking, and
only two got away before we could draw a bead on them. Things moved
fast. We left our guns and trotted over with our clubs and dispatched
the ones still moving. “Nice shooting,” I complimented.
“You
too,” he thanked me.
Russ
shot with an old reliable Remington semi–automatic, and I had the
new nylon ‘66’ semi–automatic. We would shoot 22 short hollow
point in close range and night shooting because the lead flattens out
and tears things up more when it hits; they cost less and the guns
hold more of the 22 shorts. We also had a bolt action Remington Model
513–T, ‘The Matchmaster,’ with a scope for the long distant
sniper–type shots. This rifle is loaded with 22 extra long. Every
Christmas ‘Santa’ brought us work boots, socks, a couple of jeans
and flannel shirts, maybe a toy or two, and the much anticipated
‘brick.’ The 22 caliber bullets are packaged in boxes of 50
rounds and are often sold by the ‘brick,’
a
carton contained ten boxes of 50 rounds. We really would have
believed in Santa Claus if he ever brought ‘the
case’
containing ten bricks totaling 5,000 rounds. Russ held the record for
the most kills per box competition between us with 49 jackrabbits out
of a 50 round box. No one has ever got the golden ring of
500 more words tomorrow
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