Turkeys and Guns

 

I may have bought the last gun I am ever going to buy, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm 86 years old, right? There has to be a "Last Gun" in my life, right?

The cheap part of me (small) is trying to guess when that time is nigh that I will buy a gun and die before I have time to "powder" it up. It's important. Why leave a bunch of quality tools lying around that my heirs get to use, and I don't? Selfish? Sure, call the cops.

Cheap people could never be drug addicts, but they might buy guns. I'm guessing, no experience here, that no crack or heroin addict ever plunked down the Big Green and worried if they would live to use up all of the product. It would seem that gun buying is a mania that filters more through the brain than it does the liver.

I have two guns, both rifles, that belonged to two different Great Grandfathers in my family. That would be Grandpa Schaeffer (Augustus) and Grandpa Vollertsen (Fritz). Both guns are well over a hundred years old, and were well used before I inherited them. I'm pretty sure neither Fritz nor Gus raised up in bed one of those last days and said quietly, "You know I need to shoot that rifle one more time". I'm the last person to shoot either one, and will probably do so again. Well, I don't know that, right? But at least we know the guns have been loved and used. What good is something loved if you can't use it?

I was put to thinking about cheapness, gun buying, and Great Grandfathers the other day while I was in Sports World over on 41st and Sheridan considering buying yet another gun. Ahead of me at the glass counter with all the pistols in it was a young man that looked to be in his early thirties buying a shotgun off the rack behind the counter. Looking at him, was an interesting study to me: It could have been me, ten years ago, buying a new gun in my own early thirties. His eyes had that possessive gleam in them that mine used to have (and maybe still does) when I either discovered gold in a secret place, or bought a new gun.

The salesman had just rubbed the gun down its length with a silicone rag, handed it to the trembling new owner, who then mounted the gun to his shoulder, thumb sliding through a custom thumb-hole right behind the pistol grip, looked through a scope at an imaginary turkey head centered behind a red laser dot somewhere above the salesman's head, and broke out into an actual grin.

I couldn't believe it: A shotgun with a telescopic sight, and a laser dot. Jeeminy Christmas, who'd 'a thought you could be so old and behind the times at only 66? A shotgun with a scope? I'd as soon try to kill a turkey with a leaf rake as I would such a gun.

Turkey hunting, and the weaponry that attends it, has become all the rage since I first started at twenty-one in the spring of '67. My first shot was with a Remington .270, open-sighted, pump rifle handed to me by Bill Williams, a prison guard down yonder in Granite, Oklahoma. I missed, and handed back the gun.

Next year, I had a Remington twelve-gauge 870, with which, now at the age of fifty-two, I have had considerably more success. It has a plain stock, no barrel rib, and one BB shot sighting bead at the end of the barrel. I gave that gun to Adam Webster. He kills turkeys with it every year.

Me? well, of course I had to buy another gun.

If I sounded a little critical about the fellow with the scope-sighted shotgun a moment ago, I must tell you that I was needling my "brother", and your brother, too. Any legal gun buyer is a brother of mine; there are people after both our guns, regardless of make or style.

Listen. Hear that? Hand me that new shotgun standing over there in the corner. I think I just heard a turkey gobble.

© 2011 Conrad M. Vollertsen