Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/68594
opportunity to see the gun perform on feathers. As it turned out, they do have some bird shooting and a plot was immediately hatched. A couple of months later the little gun traveled to Africa along with the big-game rifle in the side-by side Americase. Hunting sand grouse was something of a personal pilgrimage for me. As a boy I had read stories by Ruark and Hemingway about gunning the speedy little birds. One of the great things about sand grouse is that they are punctual little fellows, and follow a very precise schedule. Every morning between 9 and 10 they show up at their favored waterhole, where they circle a couple of times like mallards, and on the last turn, come screaming in to the water with the wind in their faces. On a crisp, gin-clear fall morning, Johnny and Ilonga I and shooed a whole arkfull of oryx and wildebeest and waterbuck away from a tiny waterhole in the Namibian bush and fashioned a makeshift blind in the acacia and camelthorn that ringed the little seep to wait for the arrival of the fabled sand grouse. And they came in droves. Right on time. It would be a gross understatement to say that the AYA got a real test that morning, and while the sand grouse did not disappoint, neither did the AYA! The smooth-swinging little double easily proved to be a match for the lightning-fast birds. In the end, I think that Mike had it right about the AYA. It's a great little gun and the current #2 Deluxe is, I think, an evolutionary improvement over previous models. You could use it as a stand-in for traveling trips like Mike used to do, but frankly, it is nice enough to be the centerpiece of almost anybody's collection. It proved itself on sand grouse in Namibia, and I hope to prove that it works just as well on ruffs and woodcock this fall. I haven't have put a hundred thousand rounds through it yet, but I'm working on it! I wonder if I could convince the folks at NECG that gun tests really do last that long? SPOR TIN G CL ASSICS 74