Pennsylvania Game News - April 2012 - 7

the time, skinny as a rail and grossly underweight, because I burned energy faster than I replenished the fuel tank. But when Dad asked me if I wanted to shoot his shotgun, I jumped at the chance. He handed me the gun and pointed to a rusty tin can 30 or 40 yards away. “Let’s see you hit that,” he said. As I look back on it, I’m certain my heart was pounding, but without hesitation I pressed the hammer to full cock, sighted along the barrel with its tiny brass bead on the far end, and yanked the trigger hard enough to fire the gun and break open the action at almost the same time. I saw the tin can jump just as the empty shotshell rocketed past my ear, and from far away I heard my own squeaky voice, “Holy cow!” For many years, until the end of the Great Depression, that Iver Johnson was the only gun my dad had, and he used it on everything he hunted, from deer to woodchucks. I can remember him going deer hunting with only two or three of the old punkin balls, and claiming they rattled all the way down the barrel because they had to be small enough to pass through the full choke. Later, when the rifled slug with its thin skirt of soft lead came on the market, Dad claimed the old gun shot like a rifle, and he brought a deer home almost every season to prove it. Some of my most cherished memories were when Dad hunted woodchucks with the Iver Johnson, loaded with high brass shells with an ounce and a quarter of No. 4 shot. I can’t remember for certain whether this was during the very early 1930s, before the bank holiday, or after the holiday when they shut down a good many of the banks, and those who had left their savings in the banks, lost them. Whether Dad and Mom lost money, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that during the fall when the hunting season was on, we had meat of all kinds on the table every night for supper. But during the summer months, when you couldn’t hunt squirrels, rabbits or ringnecks, Dad picked up the old shotgun, and as he and I went out the
APRIL 2012

door he told Mom to get some canning jars ready. No one today would think of hunting woodchucks with a shotgun. It just isn’t done, but back in those days you made do with what you had, and if all you had was a 12-gauge single-shot, that’s what you used for everything. And just because no one else in the neighborhood ever admitted to eating a woodchuck, Dad just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why not? Woodchucks eat the best stuff we have in the garden, plus clover and alfalfa when they can get it. They eat the same food as rabbits, and we don’t turn up our nose at rabbit.” Mom didn’t say anything to that as Dad and I went out the door and up the orchard hill to where we had broad flat fields where the hay had just been cut and stuffed away in the haymow for winter feed for our three cows. Our fields were divided by old stone walls long since fallen down and now covered with dense hedges of wild cherry brush. Woodchucks often dug their burrows under these hedges where they had protective cover and food nearby. Sometimes an older chuck would dig a burrow right out in the field, where it could sit or

Pennsylvania Game News - April 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - April 2012