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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 153 How a classic shotgun became a monument to a life well lived. By Chris Madson T he house I grew up in had more than its share of amenities—fishing poles and a skiff with a well-kept set of oars; a rangy, tick-ridden setter with a special affection for children; a resident covey of quail in a raspberry thicket out back; and several hundred acres of oak timber owned by a well-heeled local entrepreneur who was gone more often than he was around and abandoned his woods to the local kids. We were feral by day, slipping into the kitchen at odd times to feed ourselves, then disappearing for hours on end, only to show up at dusk, sweaty, and mosquito- bitten to help set the supper table. After everybody was fed and scrubbed we settled down to stories. The old man was a writer and a lover of words. Every wall in the house was lined with books. Most evenings he'd take one of my little sisters in his lap and the rest of us would gather on the floor to follow the exploits of Brer Rabbit and Mowgli, Tom and Huck, the Two Little Savages, and later, the Devil and Daniel Webster, the castaways on Mysterious Island, and the man-eaters of Kumaon. We weren't poor by any stretch, but I can remember dining on macaroni and tomatoes or bread and white gravy for several nights at the end of particularly lean months. There clearly wasn't room in the budget for the acquisition of gilt-edged firearms, as much as the old man might have coveted them. The TwenTy-One There's no doubt that he had a taste for classic shooting irons. Sometime after he left the Army Air Corps and before he took on the fiscal challenge of housing and raising a family, he'd traded for a Winchester Model 75 Sporter, a tack- driving bolt action that executed scores of fox squirrels in his hands, nearly all of them shot in the eye. He was the proud owner of a Colt Woodsman, surely one of the finest .22 automatics ever conceived, and a pre- 64 Model 70 in .243 that would clip the flea off a groundhog's ear at 300 yards. The Twenty-one materialized in the back of his closet with absolutely no fanfare when I was about 8, the endpoint of a transaction that was wrapped in secrecy until the day the old man died. It was an ascetic little 20 gauge—no engraving, no inlay, just a gold trigger and an ivory bead, 20-lines-to-the-inch checkering, and that classic line, like a greyhound caught in mid-stride. It weighed 6 1 /2 pounds, which explained our first official meeting. When the old man decided it was time for me to learn to point a shotgun, he reached for the lightest gun in the house. The fact that it was choked Skeet 1 in both barrels was also an advantage for a beginner—at 20 yards, the pattern had already spread to better than 30 inches. I got pretty handy with that little gun before he weaned me off it. One April afternoon we went out with the hand- thrower and a couple boxes of targets to burn some powder. When we were set up, he pulled a Model 12 out of a gun case and handed it to me. "Where's the Twenty-one?" I asked with some dismay. "Home. You know, Tiger, that gun is a little short in the stock. I've always suspected it was made for a woman. You've grown over the winter. Last time you shot it, I thought you were gonna catch your nose on the safety." "But you shoot it." "Sure do," he said with a grin. "That's 'cause it's mine." Over the next few years the Twenty-one taught both my little sisters how to hit a flying target, but when the lesson had been learned the Twenty-one reverted entirely to its master. A ccording to the serial number, the Twenty-one had been built sometime in the late '30s, but in the field, the old man handled it like a newborn. When we had no choice but to bust some brush, I'd watch him shield the stock with his forearm, and when the day promised to lead us through a few raspberry tangles or bois d'arc hedges, he took another gun. Same thing if the day threatened rain. Or snow. The Twenty-one was a fair-weather firearm, and every time it was touched by a human hand, whether for show around the house or duty in the field, it was lovingly stripped down and gone over with cleaning rod, cloth, and the best gun oil money could buy. Choked as it was, the Twenty-one was a specialty gun. It wasn't much use on