What Remains

You keep a few things when you "get rid of everything". Here is some of what I kept, in guns, in pigeons, in the library,... in hounds. As long s I am in NM (and a lo of other places) I must have this "family" and these tools...

My current armory.To some it would look like a lot; in fact,  it is the fewest this hunter- scholar has had in his adult life. And he feels prety serene about it. All are useful, and all have much h/story attached. ( I  also left out my WW II 1911-- my memory is not THAT good!)

Trail pistol: Hi-Standard target  ,22 from the twenties; Czech Mauser .22, old type military trainer (all my friends in Mongolia shoot them too) -- we call it our "Russian Squirrel rifle"; Model 99 Savage takedown carbine in .30-.30 ("Roy Chapman Andrews'  gun"); blackthorn cane, "Irish whuppin stick" from Bryan Romke, with cutdown .338 magnum shell on the tip by John Besse; English .410, my finest gun,  by Thomas Turner, the only shotgun I kept when I cut the collection down; "Cuckoo Clock" , 1922 guild gun 16 from Austria. given to me by David Zincavage,  a marvel of carving and engraved animals; the "Plain Gun", a Weston from Brighton, given to me by John Besse: Platonic ideal of a boxlock gun, with every shape perfect and no engraving at all; a Broomhandle Mauser, a "Red Nine" with all the bells and whistles, in the popular 9mm caliber, easy to get if not as powerful as the original Mauser. Churchill shot a bunch of Fuzzy-Wuzzies with one; T E Lawrence and Gertrude Bell carried it , as did Trotsky on the Siberian Railroad in the Russian civil war; Karamoja Bell shot down a German airplane with one. Harrison Ford carried one in Star  Wars. Two novelist correspondents of mine, Geoffrey Household and Michael Gruber, equipped their hero and heroine (Charles von Dennim and Jane Doe ) with one. Is that enough history??

 And on the bottom: 17th century patent Mongolian snaphaunce carbine of a type called "primitive" by Cherkassov in 1865, made in my lifetime by a blacksmith in Bayaan Ulgii but incorporating an older barrel and all it's reloading tools, snagged by Libby for $50. If you can build a fire hot enough to melt lead, you can shoot it.

The snaphaunce tools, the cane, and the Cuckoo Clock, with which I will attempt to shoot a rabbit tomorrow..