The Gentleman's Hunting Arsenal

One of the first things I ever shot with a rifle (air) was a North Carolina mockingbird. It was Grandma's favorite, and Grandpa whaled hell out of me. The first time I ever fired a real rifle seriously I killed a Tanganyika lion with it, and became disastrously ill thereafter, because one does not generally break in on lions, and the reaction is apt to be violent. The lion was shot with a Winchester .375 Magnum, and it made such a frightful noise that I had been afraid to shoot it in practice. A dozen years and a few elephants later, I find I'm not conscious of the noise.

The first time I ever fired a really big weapon—an English .470 double rifle—I foolishly tripped off both triggers, loosed the backblast of 150 grains of cordite against my cheek, and knocked myself as stiff as the Cape buffalo on the other end. My first memory on regaining consciousness was of Harry Selby, then a very young professional hunter, standing over me with both hands on his hips, gesturing with his chin to where a big bull buffalo lay, winding his last sad bellow. "Well, for Christ's sake," Selby said. "One of you get up."

The best leopard I ever killed—an eight-footer, on my first safari with Selby; as a matter of fact, the first leopard I ever saw—I collected with a factory-built Remington .30-06, which is battered and scarred today, but still as deadly as ever.

I own some lovely, slim tailor-made English shotguns, but the most dependable scattergun in the arsenal is still an ancient, shiny-barreled (text continued on page 184) Gentleman's Hunting Arsenal (continued from page 79) Ithaca Field Grade 12 bore, which rattles like a set of cheap castanets, cost about $28.98 wholesale in 1939, and which dispatches wounded leopards at six feet with the same stolid unconcern that it kills geese at 60 yards.

My two favorite swanky weapons are a pretty plaything called a .244 Magnum, lovingly created by England's Holland & Holland, which powers a pencil-point projectile with a milk bottle full of hand-sifted powder, and a dainty little Lewis 20-gauge, which is as murderous as a mortar, hefts not much more than a pistol, and incidentally belongs to my wife.

So you can see from this preamble that my emotions are more than slightly mixed on the kind and quantity of weapons a man might need in his armory.

The topic of guns and their usage has always ranked just behind sex and ahead of religion and politics as a source of noisily biased argument when hunters congregate over campfires and especially at bars, and the ramifications and justifications of personal preference are as myriad and catholic as taste in women. It is possible for one man to spend a lifetime of contentment with one woman, who will serve all his needs and desires. Another gentleman, of more flexible fancy, may be miserable without a harem of fluctuating shapes and sizes and colors, to fit a fleeting whim and a momentary mood as well as a basic function. So it is with weapons. The major difference between guns and women is that there are very few untrustworthy guns.

If you consider that this is an article for a hunter who might be fortunate enough to go on an African safari or an Indian shikar; who might want to shoot an Alaskan brown bear or a Wyoming elk or a Virginia whitetail or a Canadian grizzly or a Connecticut woodchuck; who might wish to vary his bobwhite quail with Vermont grouse and Chesapeake mallard and Louisiana honkers, and in the end might even desire a clean way out of a world that generally displeases him, the choice of weapons is as personal and every bit as whimsical as preferences in clothes and sports cars.

There is no North American game animal that cannot be executed handily with a .30-06, from polar bear to moose, if you're good enough to pop it through the shoulder, hit it in the head or stick one straight down the middle. I have never known a better weapon than Remington's Model 721 for the majority of domestic uses, but on the big bear, brown, polar and grizzly, and even on the heavier noncarnivores like elk and moose, the classic .30-06 is giving away a little weight. Hence, for big-game shooting on any continent but Africa, I'd say the .300 Magnum with a Mauser-type action is about the finest all-round medium weapon made. It is flatter and heavier than the .30-06, and has a most amazing wallop. Winchester's Model 70 is as potent a piece of factory-made machinery as you can buy.

If I were a man whose hunting needs were largely confined to his own gross area, for his annual limit of local deer, but who hoped occasionally to slide over to Canada or Alaska for the bigger bear or moose, I'd settle for the scoped bolt-action .300 Magnum as a basic rifle that's not too big for pronghorn but can extinguish an elk or a grizzly as definitively as anything the best English gunmaker ever turned out. And the advantage of the .300, no matter who makes it, is that if a wealthy aunt's demise or a lucky stroke in the market ever takes the modest hunter to Africa or India, he is already equipped with his basic rifle for anything up to buffalo, rhino and elephant. You can always rent or borrow the heavier stuff from your safari or shikar firm. I shot my way through the entire Indian list once, including three tigers and the biggest split-hoof of them all, the wild ox called gaur, with rented guns, and was not unduly pained.

Saying you could only afford one medium rifle, the .300 wins the argument, but it's a mite mighty for the tenderer game. A second rifle, particularly for brush shooting, might well be the time-rubbed .30-30 or .32 Special Winchester, with iron sights, rabbit-ear or peep, according to preference. The old lever-action has probably accounted for more deer than any other single weapon for the last 60 years or so. It's the fabled gun of the hairy West, and has always been the wee-pon that the cowboy stuck in his saddle scabbard, whether he was out for antelopes, Injuns or cattle rustlers. The carbines shoot straight, if not so very far, and if you know your gun—well, J. Frank Dobie, the old Western writer, took the head off a turkey at 200-plus yards with a .30-30 that's nearly as old as he is, just this last year in Texas. Of course, he had to figure the ballistic lob a little, but you can quite often do that with the aid of bourbon whiskey.

The indispensable second rifle, however, without which no larger-calibered weapon is complete, is the good, workaday .22 long rifle. No real difference who makes it—any of the Americans, English, Germans, Czechs, Italians—and whether it is motivated by bolt, lever or automatic action is a matter of personal preference. When I say a "good" .22, I don't mean one of the Hornets or Swifts or the other hyperglandular guns that pulverize little stuff or break up on the outside of tougher game, and that travel at such speed that a twig or a stout stalk of grass will explode the bullet.

The .22 rimfire is indispensable to the big-game hunter because the spit of a .22 makes no more noise than a snapped stick, making it invaluable as a meat gun and particularly priceless for finishing off wounded animals without rousing the neighborhood. Equipped with a six-power or a variable-powered scope, it kills birds you can't reach with a shotgun, and animals so large that it will amaze you. Using a .22 on anything larger than a dik-dik is illegal in Africa, but to my certain knowledge leopard, lion, and at least one near-champion lesser kudu have been killed with an ordinary rimfire .22. My professional friend Selby, who admittedly is a fantastic shot, often killed eland (the world's largest antelope, bigger than a Brahma steer) with the .22 when he was a kid living on the family farm outside Nanyuki in Kenya. Of course, he shot the eland in the head.

On scopes in general, the thumb rule is lesser magnification for longer ranges, because the slightest error on the trigger end increases missing-margin as the range lengthens. For this reason you would not want much more than four power on a heavier gun with a reasonably stout recoil, but you can take a magnification up to six or eight power on the little .22, whose effective range is not going to be much over a hundred yards, but whose target is apt to be so small that it can stand all the magnification the law allows. We don't make any bad scopes in America—Lyman, Weaver, Bausch & Lomb and all the others turn out fine examples, with fancy adjustable, varipowered models to taste.

We've mentioned the old-timey carbine as a second medium rifle. But if I were living in a country that ran high on hills, with little opportunity for jumpshooting that would warrant a fast-action brush gun, I would certainly scrap the carbine in favor of a reasonably new weapon, the .243 Magnum as made by Winchester, or better, an even newer rifle, the .244 Magnum as produced by Remington over here and by Holland & Holland in England. For extremely long shooting with maximum accuracy, I've never seen the beat of these little assassins.

We tuck the .243 and .244 in with the scopes because these rifles are really an extension of the scope, rather than the other way around. These are the guns with which one shoots from a very steady rest at extremely long ranges with utmost magnification at hard-to-approach game on the other side of the valley, with no bush intervening to bust up the bullet. These are the guns for the dim-distant mountain goat or crag-perching sheep or the scary pronghorn on an open plain, when close stalking is impossible.

I used the .244, which flings a tiny 100-grain bullet from a .300-Magnum case, the first time during the last couple of years, and found a whole fresh concept of shooting. Developing a muzzle velocity of 3500 feet per second, in that thin African air it was dead flat at 500 yards, and so fast that you could almost forget about leads on running stuff. With a wide-open scope (Bausch & Lomb Balvar 2-1/2 x 8 power), a pro named Ken Jespersen and I played a sort of pool—calling right or left eye — when we were shooting zebra for hides and camp meat, at distances up to 415 measured yards. I also saw Harry Selby fatally puncture one Thomson's gazelle, not much bigger than a fox terrier, at 700 yards, just by holding a little high. We shot all the big, tough antelopes like topi and kongoni, and they went over pole-axed. We shot Grévy's zebra—a Grévy is as big as a Percheron stallion—stone dead with one bullet. I knocked a leopard a good 12 feet off a limb, and collected him in a crumpled heap at the bottom of his tree. Any leopard man will tell you that the average leopard, even heart-shot with a heavier rifle, will usually travel a hundred yards or so before you pick him up, and even then he might have a little scratch left in his claws.

With a minimum two, and hopefully three, rifles as a base, we outfit our modest hunter with two shotguns. First would be an automatic 12 bore for heavy work with lead-carrying birds such as duck, geese and turkey—in brief, for sedentary shooting where the opportunity for action comes in sudden infrequent flurries warranting fast fire power. Perhaps some people still fancy the pump gun; I can see little reason for a pump action unless you are hopelessly old-fashioned and arrogantly skillful with the trombone style of shooting—not when you can get off the same three shots by pulling the trigger three times without wrecking the rhythm of your swing. I specify 12 gauge only because ducks and geese fly high and tote shot, and a turkey comes seldom to a blind. I know one man who consistently shoots the heads off turkeys and kills ducks and geese with a .410, but he is a Texan, and Texans are not as other people.

But I would recommend a 20-bore double for rough shooting upland, because of its comparative lightness and speed of handling, also bearing in mind that anything you shoot over a dog in the woods is apt to flush within easy range and will be out of sight (and range) by the time you've tripped off two shots.

You can make it on one shotgun, of course, with a spare set of barrels for high waterfowl shooting, and if you have to do it without the extra barrels, 28 inches is the all-purpose acceptable length. Thirty is preferred by a great many people for the reach-out gun, and 26 inches is the best for shooting swift stuff like quail and grouse over dogs, because of the faster pattern spread. There are choke-adapters as well to screw onto your automatic or pump, if you must be a one-gun, one-set-of-barrels hunter, but I don't subscribe to any all-purpose weapon. Like any other compromise, it sacrifices precise performance for loose usage.

There is no advantage of single-barrel over double, of side-by-side compared to over-and-under. I grew up with those two fat side-by-side tubes under my nose, and so could not hit the bull in the brisket with an automatic, a pump, or even an over-and-under. The latter, to me, is just another single-barreled gun that's risen above its station. But it's all a matter of personal preference, and I know some gentlemen, including myself, who really do not prefer blondes.

As a youngster in Carolina we were very short on rifles—in the sandspur and green swamp country you shoot deer and even bear with buckshot—but there was always a passel of shotguns around the house. I naturally and greedily formed the habit of taking two double-barreled shotguns into the duck or goose blind with me. It was not until I was a man grown and suddenly accidentally affluent enough to find myself on a Scottish grouse-moor that I learned that the toffs always shot matched pairs of doubles, and that anybody who showed up in a butt with an automatic would have been drummed out of the jolly old Highlands. What I do recall, vividly and with great pride, is squatting in a cornfield one day about 30 years ago with two rusty old 12s that were almost as long as I was tall. A great flock of geese came in off the water to raid the corn and I downed two coming with one gun, grabbed the other and clobbered two more going away. All of a sudden the air was full of falling geese, and I was the richest kid in the area of Cape Hatteras. Much later on, I shot three Bengal tigers in 10 days, but they didn't pack the same emotional wallop as those four Canucks tumbling out of the air to hit with a feathery crash on that frozen ground.

The American shotgunner is not so much a matched-pair man as the European, largely because of the availability and types of wildfowl, not to mention something nasty called a legal limit. But in shooting driven birds, or released birds, the matched pair of doubles is the difference between going first class and not going at all.

Stoeger's Shooter's Bible is mouthwateringly full of tempting riflery from the houses of Winchester, Remington, Marlin, et al., and the better gun shops are crammed with bargains in fine secondhand tailor-mades from Britain, Germany and Spain. But if I were splurging a mite on the armory, for largely domestic use, I would plunge on the shotgun side and buy myself a couple of tailor-mades. A shotgun should really fit the shooter, since you swing it instead of aim it, which means it should be stocked to measure. I would say that the English are all by themselves in the custom shotgun business—Purdey, Greener, Churchill, Lewis and Holland are some of the good old names—if only because of the lovely grace of their guns.

The best-grade American factory weapon looks as if it had been gnawed out of a log by a singularly untalented beaver when stacked alongside an English custom shotgun (not too surprising in view of the price differential), but people like Winchester and Browning turn out some magnificent custom weapons that fire perfect patterns and will beat the Russians to the moon with some of the stouter magnum loads. Not long ago Winchester launched a new automatic made of fiberglass wrapped around a steel tube, with aluminum moving parts, which is about a pound and a half lighter than the old all-steel. I have never fired a glass gun, but the Winchesters say their Model 59 is stronger than steel, and kicks little despite its lightness. No detectable reaction has been observed from London, where they still make featherweight shotguns by hand, from steel.

Half the fun of hunting is to have the right gun for the right game, and jet aircraft today has made exotic hunting pretty practical in terms of time and money for the hunter who, a very few years ago, might never have dreamed of shooting a tiger or seeing an elephant. This hopeful gentleman can go completely mad when he considers the choice of weapons the various manufacturers hurl at him.

He would now begin to fret about the merits of the double express rifle as opposed to the heavy magaziner, the medium-heavy magaziner, the medium magaziner, the light-medium magaziner, the light magaziner, the whole range of fanciful playthings. I can save him a lot of time by telling him to add a Winchester .375 Magnum to his .300 Magnum, his .244 or .243 and his .22 long rifle, and he is in business for anything that roars, trumpets, bellows or merely snorts. If this is oversimplification, shoot me—but preferably not with the .375. It is not a people gun.

I favor the double rifle for close work on wounded big, surly beasts such as elephant, buffalo and rhino in thick bush, where maneuverability is everything, and bullet weight counts. The double is closer to being foolproof than any other rifle, since there is no bolt to hang up on you, and you can certainly get off two shots—boom! boom!—faster in the rough direction of something large and nasty that suddenly blurts at you from six feet with only one thing in mind. But unless you are a professional—or at least a semiprofessional big-game hunter—the chances are you will not find yourself chasing up wounded dangerous game in dense thickets of thorn. Your hunter most likely won't let you play at that business, because he can't risk his reputation by having you killed.

One major disadvantage of the classic double is that it is largely useless at ranges over a hundred yards, since the two side-by-side barrels are constructed to converge their bullets at that distance, and after convergence the bullets continue on in radically independent directions. As big game grows scarcer and wilder, it quite often is not possible to approach within a hundred yards of a good trophy rhino, buffalo or elephant. This makes your double a terribly dicey proposition, because the heavy bullet falls like a thrown baseball after it passes its limit of convergence, and you are shooting strictly by guess and by God.

Another disadvantage of the double is its prohibitive price if bought new. A first-quality, custom-built English double will sting you for about $2500, without too much fancy gold engraving. Few people have them built anymore; you can pick up good secondhand doubles at gunshops such as Abercrombie & Fitch or through the weapons catalogs. On used doubles, the maker's signature of Holland & Holland, Purdey, Westley-Richards, Jeffery, Merkel Bros. or J. Springer of Vienna is an approximation of Tiffany for quality. The stubby, relatively light Jeffery .450/400 with which I bagged my last two elephants cost me just $500, and I never owned a straighter shooting gun—for 100 yards.

The double is purely an insurance gun for people who like shotgun action for fast snapshooting at charging or running game. I wouldn't be caught dead in the bush without one, but a man like Selby, for instance, won't use one. Selby would rather go into the thickets naked with a dull knife than without his unscoped long-barreled Rigby .416 magaziner, which in his hands achieves the perfection of radar and the penetration of an antitank gun. The .416 is generally accorded to be the punchiest bolt-action weapon made by anybody. Its penetrative powers are only exceeded by the Westley-Richards .318 (man named Tony Henley shot an elephant in one end with a .318, and the bullet came out of the other end), but the .318 can't touch the .416 as a slugger. I have a .318 myself, a beautiful weapon, and can't hit anything with it. I do much better with the old .30-06, or with the .375 or .300 Magnum.

The closest thing to a heavy magazine rifle factory-built by Americans is Winchester's brawling .458, which is far too much gun for anything on this continent. In that weight I'd personally want my heavy load propelled by a double.

Invariably when a man goes progressively mad with gun fever, he gets involved with hair triggers. One time I was forced to borrow some rifles, and they all had hair triggers. For the first and only time in my life I heard guns going off before I was ready to shoot. What's worse, I got addled and managed to gut-shoot a leopard—the only one I ever wounded in a dozen years—and spent the nastiest hour I can remember since the war crawling around in a dark Kenya swamp where you couldn't see an elephant, much less a leopard, two feet ahead of you. Fortunately the leopard was dead when we found him, and the whole horrible mess made 60,000 words of useful fiction, but as a rule I prefer to invent my own fictional devices. You can carry research too far.

I suppose by now you're wondering what sort of armament I'm rodded up with, and the answer is simply: too much.

I am witless in a secondhand gun shop, and quite often wind up with toys such as the last Rigby .275 with which the fabled Karamojo Bell used to shoot bull elephant in the earhole. I am like Ado Annie in my ability to say no to a beautiful bargain—usually after a martini lunch—in the musty back room of the frightfully genteel shops that traffic in vintage firearms. The result is that I have weapons scattered pretty well around the globe, and most of them have become the tacit property of their keepers.

But I did tick off the arsenal on my last safari, and found from left to right in the rack: a .30-06 Remington; Bell's old .275 Mauser-action Rigby; the .244 H. & H. Magnum; the Jeffery double; the 20-gauge Lewis shotgun; a 12-gauge Webley & Scott double; the ancient Ithaca 12; Selby's .416 Rigby; a .375 Winchester Magnum; a .243 Winchester Magnum; and a Czech Brno .22 long rifle.

Missing were a brace of Spanish doubles, now residing in Mexico or Texas; a matched pair of English 12s, now in Spain; a Marlin .30-30 which lives in Japan; another .375, lent to a friend on safari; the .318, safely stored with the Kenya police; and the .300 Magnum, in the gunshop for rebluing and refinishing.

Perhaps we didn't need all this hardware, but we used everything we had along for its specialized purpose (with the exception of the Bell gun, which we merely lug for luck). An example: My best buff was collected just before dark on the last day in the Masai country. He was a herd bull, a 48-incher, and the day was so dark you could barely make him out with the naked eye, milling as he was in a mob of perhaps 200 other buffalo. There was no hope of getting closer than about 250 yards, so I discarded my double and reached for the scoped .375 magaziner. He came out large and clear in the scope and you could hear the first two bullets whistle as they passed clean through his shoulders. I was able to stick two more into him as he lumbered away. I wouldn't have been able to see him, much less shoot him, with the double.

The bull lugged four of my slugs and two of Selby's .416s into very tough, dense bush with him, with night falling with appalling swiftness. When we dived into the baleful black thorn—the Kenya Game Department takes a very misty view of professionals who don't follow up wounded animals and I am classed as at least a semipro—I had switched again to the short double.

No heroics intrude here. We spotted him standing, mean and sick, waiting for us. Selby stuck one up his nose with the .416, and he went over. But he kept getting up at a range of about four feet and I was very pleased to be wearing my big-mouthed double. It's a great gun for hipshooting.

We used the shotguns on huge flights of sand grouse and picked off distant guineas with the .22. Both the .30-06 and the .244 were used on leopard. I got close enough to a big trophy elephant to down him with the .450/400. We finished everything that needed a bullet in the brain with the .22, and shot camp meat with the .243, collecting hides with the .244. Selby killed a long-distance buffalo for his own collection with one shot from the .375. Altogether we figured we didn't have too many guns.

There is very little in the way of luxury a man may buy for himself, unless he fancies yachts, foppish jewelry, a redundancy of automobiles or a stable of ladyfriends. A battery of good weapons has a decided advantage over both women and yachts; the initial payment is less, they don't need so much constant care, don't fall out of fashion so fast, and have a definitely more dependable trade-in value. This I keep telling myself every time I succumb to another fancy piece of weaponry and hate myself in the morning.

But the way I see it, a man can't have too many guns. For a fun nut too much is never a sufficiency, and if it's status symbols you seek, I'd look silly as hell in a mink coat.

See page 184 for identifying caption and key