The Wandering around Rifle

WALNUT HILL

- Terry Wieland

Years ago, a friend of mine made a habit of going out on weekends, wandering up and down the wide power lines that cut a broad swathe through the woods behind his house. If it was deer season, he was deer hunting; in the winter it was wolves or coyotes, and any other time of the year it was, well, anything huntable that came along.

We called it hunting but, since most of the time we came back empty-handed, his delightful wife, who had a healthy sense of both humor and proportion, referred to it laughingly as “walking with weapons.” The term appealed to us in an odd kind of way, so we started calling it the same thing. After all, that’s exactly what we were doing, and rather than being a somewhat questionable activity for a pair of (supposedly) grown men, it was one with an honorable history stretching back to long before there even was history.

Once early man had fashioned a club, and later a spear, and learned how to use it, one imagines he was never seen without it. A club sitting back in the cave is not much use, now is it? And you just never know.

Try to imagine a frontiersman like Daniel Boone without his Kentucky long rifle, or a mountain man without his Hawken. In his finest J.M. Pyne story, “The Madman of Gaylord’s Corner,” Lucian Cary describes Pyne leaving his farmhouse in Vermont; he automatically picks up his .25-caliber single shot and takes it with him, not because he expects trouble, but because you simply don’t go out without a rifle. What are your hands for, if not to carry your rifle?