Knowing me they thought that I made him up so I could claim that I had a friend, I was later proven correct in that they met Phil with his soon to be invisible dog (other story).
Anyway they being first time hunters would want to borrow a shotgun. When I graduated from college i had no money but I did have credit. My father decided it was time for me to get my own shotgun ( I had been borrowing his fathers shotgun stored under his bed without his knowledge), and so off to the gun store for me. The movie Terminator staring Arnold was popular at that time and guess what, you could buy that shotgun.
Well that was the coolest gun in the store and it was only $700. Being a new engineer I spent all my money before it hit my bank account so I didn't have the money in cash. The nice man at the counter told me that HFC (Household Finance) would give me the money for the gun and I could make payments. This was the ticket, for $67 a month I could own this beauty. I ended up paying about $1200 for this but it was worth it.
I was so excited that I asked it there was somewhere I could shoot it, he let me shoot it into a steel tube into a barrel of water, kind of anti climatic but I did shoot it.
I took it to the trap range, there were beautiful guns there, Browning, Remington all with beautiful wood stocks and here I walk up with my Terminator gun. Boy did I get the looks. I quickly found that it is impossible to hit a clay pigeon with the stock in this position and I discovered that it folds down. I also found that the 20in barrel was unsuitable for hitting birds beyond about 20 yards. The upside was that it held 8 shells and you could fire them as fast as you can pull the trigger. I may not have been able to hit anything but I could get off at least 4 shots while it was in the air. I became acquainted with the hail over the PA system, "No rapid fire on the range". It turns out that this little beauty was not the best choice for bird hunting, I did take 2 deer with it though. So I went to the local sports store and bought a $200 Remington 870 express, perfect for the job at hand.
Not able to part with my Terminator gun it sat in the cabinet except for brief appearances at the range so that I could hear the "No rapid fire on the range" command once again. However, this little 10lb beauty found another purpose. When these newbie hunters would ask to borrow a gun I would send them to my gun cabinet. By now there were several choices available but invariably their eyes would glimmer and they would pull the SPAS 12 out of the closet and they would say " how about this one". At first I would caution them that this was a very heavy gun, that it was only good for about 20yards blah blah but they to a man never listened.
Pheasant hunting went something like this, we would get up really early, pile into someones car and drive to Indiana for a put and take pheasant hunt. We didn't have a dog but that didn't stop us, we learned that if we followed the truck tire prints in the snow we could find where the driver had gotten out of the truck and released the pheasants. (remember we are all engineers here, well except one medical professional).
We would stomp around the field hoping to see a pheasant. We saw them of course, hopelessly out of range and the newbie hunter would be out there shooting away, never hitting anything of course.
If slug and buffalo were one thing, it was persistent. We hunted all day long, other hunters would get their limit and we would keep hunting, the gun would get heavier and heavier as the day wore on. We would start hearing, wow this gun is heavy, wow this gun is really heavy, does anyone else want to carry this gun for awhile. It never failed that the person carrying the big gun was the first person back to the car.
To a man, the very next hunting trip that newbie hunter had purchased their own gun.
