42 .410pigeon grade or my late uncles Crescent .410. I know a big difference but the more I think about it the more I am thinking that I ought to take the Crescent. The Crescent is not gem to look at and I do not shoot it that well. The left barrel is choked so tight that anything under 25 yards can be crushed. My kids can not figure out why I keep it. They never hunted with my uncle. The most humble, happy man, I ever knew who never complained in my hearing.
A man who overcame setbacks his entire life. Rheumatic fever and Polio as a child, crippling arthritis as an adult, heart problems from the Rheumatic fever as an adult. I never knew him as a boy but I watched him go from being a strong young man, able to farm, to having to work in an farm store lifting bags of grain, feed and fertilizer, to a man who wen to college to become an accountant as his body betrayed him and in the end a man who struggled to walk and do the simplest task of life. But he was also a man who loved to hunt and fish, loved to sit and listen to a quail call or a whip-poor-will, loved to talk with his nephews and loved that Crescent .410. He had better, fancier guns, but he could handle that cheap, store band double like a maestro conducting a fine symphony. Many is the time that I watched him drop a pair on a covey flush. Often when he only shot once on the flush I would ask him why he had not shot a second bird? His reply was he only saw hens after his first shot. And I rarely recall him taking a female bird. Maybe he did only see hens, maybe he just wanted them to get away so he could come back again. Yeah, I think it will be Uncle Juniors gun on day one. He would like that and I think I will as well.
| 