Ambulance Driver Files A Day in the Life | Kelly Grayson
Way back in the dark ages of the Internet, in 2007, Marko Kloos wrote a blog post about his favorite rifle, a shortened #4 Enfield:
It’s not much to look at, worthless to a collector, and completely devoid of flash and glitz and tacticality. It has no optics, just aperture iron sights. It has no accessory rails, vertical foregrip, fancy sling swivels, laser, or flashlight. Its only accessory is an eight-dollar leather sling.
But.
… Something about this rifle makes it work exceptionally well with my shoulder, and hands, and arms, and eyes, to the point where putting bullets on target feels as natural as breathing and walking.
I think most serious shooters have a gun like that, one indistinguishable from a hundred thousand others to the casual observer, but nonetheless like Dumbo’s magic feather to the shooter who treasures it.
For me, that rifle is an old, nondescript Winchester Model 74 in .22 LR. Its stock is dented and dinged, its bluing long-since replaced with the patina borne of rust and sweat, its trigger nothing special… but I know exactly where it breaks, and that rifle is like an extension of my left arm.
I took my first squirrel with that rifle, and a few hundred since. Dad would shoot running quail with it. It has accounted for at least half a dozen feral hogs, and countless possums and skunks. In fact, my rite of passage, shooting-wise, was when Dad trusted me with the responsibility of shooting the critters we had trapped in our feed room. Normal procedure was to take the live trap out of the feed room, haul it to the front of our property, back off about 75 yards, and trip the release with a long string. Anything that ran out, you shot. If what ran out was black and white, you let it get some distance from the trap before you put it down.
The trap seemed unusually heavy that morning, but we thought little of it. It reeked a bit of skunk musk, and Dad warned me that there might be more than o0ne animal in the trap, one of which was definitely a skunk, but when he pulled the release, a possum ran out.
“Pop!” One dead possum…
… and then the skunk ran out…
… and the second possum…
… and the third possum…
… and the second skunk.
I got all five, and Dad let me handle the task of vermin eradication from then on.
Well, except that one time…
We were tearing down that aforementioned feed room, and a big skunk had denned up under the floorboards. Try as we might, we could not make him give up his spot. We’d poke and prod – Dad poised outside with that Winchester – try to convince the skunk to make a run for it, but all he’d do is hunker down and spray some more.
Finally, my Uncle Sonny, jokingly, sprayed the skunk with some Right Guard deodorant… and that skunk erupted from that hole like he’d been shot out of a cannon.
“Here he comes, Norman!” Uncle Sonny shouted a warning, and presently we heard a “POP.”
And then another.
And another.
And finally, a fusillade of gunfire that sounded a little, well… panicked.
We found Dad outside, looking very relieved, with the dead skunk about thirty feet away.
“I let him get a ways out,” Dad explained shakily, “and then I shot, like a usually do. But it musta ricocheted off his head and just addled him, because when he came to, he turned and ran… straight at me. I shot him twice more, and they’d just slow him down a little bit, and then he’d start coming again. And then I remembered I had a hollow point somewhere in that magazine…”
I pretty much repeated that same scenario twenty years later, with a feral hog that charged me. I had picked off two of his compatriots, only to notice, too late, the third hog who already had a bead on me. I emptied the magazine on that one, and only kept him off me with an “Olé!” pirouette and a prod with the barrel as he ran by.
I’ll take – and make – shots with that .22 that are well out of the .22 LR performance envelope. Matt G., Joe Speer and I have whacked prairie dogs with that rifle at ranges out to 180 yards, offhand. We may have been lobbing in those CCI Stingers like mortars, but if Cynomys ludovicianus was in the open from 200 yards and in, he was in mortal danger.
I handed it to LawDog at Blogorado that first year, tossed a few tennis balls out at the 100-yard berm, and invited him to give it a whirl. After bouncing a tennis ball around at will, offhand at 100 yards, he grinned evilly and said, “Headshots at 100 yards, heh. This shall be my prairie dog medicine this afternoon.”
It’s way more accurate than it has any right to be. With premium ammo and a good rest, it will group into an inch at 100 yards.
Yes, you read that right. It’s got MOA accuracy, and that’s from a circa 1940’s gallery rifle that originally sold for $18.45.
This rifle will never leave my ownership, but it’s about to leave my hands. I’m going to risk messing with its mojo, and send it off to a gunsmith for professional rebluing and minor cosmetic work. I’ll have the old screw holes where a sidesaddle scope mount once resided welded and filled in, and I’ll refinish the stock myself. Given my propensity for abusing guns, I might have it Durablued instead. I’ll finish it off with a nice 4x scope, instead of the mediocre Tasco glass that sits there now.
When it comes back looking like the day Dad bequeathed it to me, I’ll post pics.
Wish me luck.
