Rifle, where are you going with that boy?

                                                                                                     

this is a 303 British rifie

       

The story starts out when I was just a young boy of 12. I always looked at the mountains, as I like to hunt deer. The deer lived in the mountains. And you had to get to the mountains to go hunting. My brother had a friend named Bud. He loved to hunt deer to. Or was it that he loved hunting deer and we came along a lot of times. Bud came along and picked me up and I would go hunting with him.

Now we had an old rifle in our family. It was a 303 British, a gun that was used in World War l and ll. It was a very big gun. It had a wood stock that ran from the bottom of the rifle to the barrel. It was a good four feet long. And I was lucky that I was 5 feet tall. And weighed about 85 pounds.The gun weighed 20-30 pounds. And it was the only rifle I was allowed to use.

Bud loved to hunt in Franklin County. There was a road that ran up Mapleton. Then the road went to Willow Flats. The road cut off and went up Franklin Basin. At the top of Franklin Basin there was a mountain that they called the Knob. Bud always loved hunting the Knob. Now the Knob had a backside. And the backside had no road. So If you shot a deer, it was a big job to get the deer back over to the front of the Knob. Sometimes it took two or three days to get the dead deer over to the other side of the Knob. Even though the Knob had a front side, we always started there in the dark of the morning, and we always ended up on the back side to hunt deer. It always seemed that  the big ones were on the back side of the Knob. Now the big ones could be a doe, a two point buck or a four point. It did not matter, we always found it and shot it on the back side of the Knob.

I’m sure Bud also took me along because he enjoyed having a companion, and someone who could carry his rifle out while he was dragging the deer out. This was in October, so there wasn’t danger of the meat spoiling before we could get it to the truck. We would drag it so far and then go home for the night. Then the next day we’d go back for the deer. Instead of cutting it up there on the site, we always thought we had to drag the entire animal to the truck and not waste a bit of it. We were hunting more for the meat than for a trophy. We always wanted to bring something home, no matter what the size, and not come home empty-handed.

We went up and down hills, up draws and down gulleys, and past huge dead trees. There was a lot of history in those old dead trees. You could tell that some had been in fires. We walked past rock slides and always tried to walk around them. There was always something to see, as well as deer. From the back side we could spot the deer easier and there was less timber to hide them. We walked past beautiful scenery on the back side. We could see Preston and Franklin from there.

I don’t ever remember hauling the gun being a problem for me, even though it was so long and so heavy. One day we ran into a man we knew who said, “Now, where is that rifle going with that kid?” I was glad I had a gun so I could go hunting, so I never thought of it as being so big. But it must have been a funny sight. A few years ago I reminded him about his remark and he said, “Yes, I remember that very well.” He was an insurance man and knew everybody and liked to talk to everybody, and that way he could sell a lot of insurance, too.
  
Wikipedia says the rifle weighed just over 10 pounds, but to me it felt like 20 or 30.The rifle was 44 inches long and I was about 60 inches tall, so it must have been a sight to see me lugging that 303 British over the hills.

So now, whenever I think of hunting one of the first thoughts in my mind is, “Rifle, where are you going with that boy?”