Circling Back: Chronicle of a Texas River Valley

7. Off the End of a Gun

7 Off the End of a Gun A well-reg;ulated militia being necessary to the security ofafree State, the right ofthe people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Constitution of the United States, Second Amendment My brother and I measured life's progress in the early years by the stages in our acquisition of hunting weapons. Sticks dominated in preschool times, and in addition to making spears and clubs we fashioned bats to whack at bumblebees that hovered about the yard in summer. Stones leaped into prominence with our advance to slingshots ; thereafter, we yearned for our parents to take us to the gravel pit dug by road repairmen so we could stuffour pockets with top-quality pebbles. After that, the shared BB gun briefly occupied center stage, but it quickly lost out to the single-shot .22 rifles that somehow made their way from the Sears Roebuck catalog to the space beneath our Christmas tree whenJack was ten and I was eleven. As the grown-ups had adopted the new farming technology with its abridgements of independence, so we embraced each new and more powerful weapon with seldom a worry that its operation required sup- plies from outside. Only the sticks had been totally our own. Slingshots needed elastic bands, which came first from the red tire tubes of natural rubber, next from the inferior black tubes that replaced the red ones in the late 1940s, and finally from boxes labeled "large rubber bands." BB's and .22 cartridges came in packets from the Western Auto hardware store, manufactured by an alchemy I never understood and seldom thought about. The store always had those things and would until eternity ifyou had the money to buy them. The .22 rifles elevated us to the apex of youthful power. For fifty cents you could get a box offifty "short" cartridges, the least powerful .22 ammunition available in Jasper but standard for birds and squirrels . From Corbett we found that shorts also were deadly on hogs if you placed the shot properly. We lived in a hunter's coma until the first northers blew in fall and the robins arrived. Wave on wave the birds would come, from some unknown source in the north. They would swoop out of the frosty blue to infuse holly and yaupon trees with a teeming animal vigor. "Chip! Tee-tee-tee-tee!" Saturday morning would find us sneaking through a second-growth hardwood tangle with our .22'S to get a bead on a russet breast. Robin pie for supper. People said later we weren't supposed to shoot robins. Northern city dwellers waited each spring for them to return to sing songs we in the South had never heard and to run about the lawns eating earthworms . When Texas skies emptied of robins in the late fifties and sixties , I wondered whether we had killed them all. It was some relief to later learn there might have been other culprits - pesticides sprayed on northern lawns or southern hardwoods cut and replaced with loblolly pine. ~The human body surpasses that ofany other animal in its fitness for hurling objects. Early people everywhere found that casting sticks and stones could break bones and thereby aid them in hunting animals and defending themselves. Later, for thousands ofyears, spears tipped with stone or bone served as hunting implements. Invention of the throwing stick, or atlatl, and eventually the bow lent greater speed to spears and arrows, letting hunters kill at greater distances. Thus, as 59 Offthe End of a Gun 60 Offthe End of a Gun time went on, for men to compete successfully in hunts and battles depended more and more on their ability to send projectiles accurately and far. When people in the Old World a thousand years or so after the birth ofChrist found that certain chemical concoctions could explode, they marveled at the noise and flash. Some credit the Chinese for inventing gunpowder, but the Europeans or the Arabians may have equally valid claims. In any case, Friar Roger Bacon of England left one of the earliest proofs of such knowledge -just prior to A.D. 1250 he wrote down the formula for gunpowder. He was so frightened ofits power that he concealed the formula for many years. But others knew about it also, and the genie got out ofthe bottle. The properties ofgunpowder when ignited, coupled with the...