Old Guns: A Trip Down Memory Lane

 

We did it a different way “back in the day.” I’m talking about muzzleloading for deer. You’ll notice (some of you) that I just made a verb out of a noun. Don’t try that at home, kids. It’ll affect your ACT scores.

Yeah, we’re taking a trip down Memory Lane, again, but with a purpose; a tip that hopefully will affect your modern game in a positive way.

Here it is: Do not, absolutely do not, approach a downed deer with an unloaded muzzleloader. Deer downed with a bullet driven by the less powerful black powder employed by the ancients, get up and run away, often, even with hits that prove, later, to be mortal wounds. Ask me how I know. I am an ancient.

Hits with modern smokeless powder almost always prove to be accompanied with total bullet penetration. Not so with the ancient black powder said to have been invented by the Chinese to accommodate their love of fireworks. Leave it to the evil white man to see its potential use as a propellant for chunks of lead fired down tubes of steel.

True smokeless powder came on the scene in the late 1800’s when it was adopted for bullet use overnight, as they say, its efficacy in the gun game being apparent to anyone with half the brains God gave a goose. I am not going to bore you with the relevant details.

Well, yes I am. Here’s one: I once shot a deer, dead, with one roundball and 90 grains of FFG black powder shot from a Hawken replica made for me by Willie Cochrane of Tulsa from museum drawing-specs from a museum in Nebraska. The 200-grain bullet hit the deer right at the base of the neck. The distance was no more than twenty yards.

When I walked up to the deer (it seemed like only four long steps), I saw the entry hole made by the bullet right where I had held the open sights at the base of its neck; exactly there. When I looked again, I saw the bullet that killed the deer lying right there on the ground half an inch from its entry hole.

I still have the bullet in a desk drawer near where I sit writing this. Would you like to see it? I take it out and look at it often, yea, these thirty-something years later.

You tell me: How does a bullet that penetrated no more than that, one that rolled out of its entry hole, back out into the open air, kill anything? Anything at all. It’s a mystery to me, still.

A time or two (more than that), the thought has occurred to me that the deer was still alive when I dressed it (a nice buck). If so, it did not complain. I can assure you that, in any case, it went to a better place.

Reload, reload, reload. Now.

Copyright © 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen

 

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