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Squirrelly About Elk Hunting
One hot summer day, my buddy Jay and I were looking for something to do and, since Dad had long ago locked up all of the power tools, we were struggling with ideas. As we started looking around the barn for something to keep us occupied, a faded old pickup rumbled into the barnyard, stirring up dust and rolling to a stop in front of us. The fellow inside was obviously a farm hand, complete with the John Deere hat, denim shirt with the arms cut off and pliers holder on his belt. He looked at us for a second and said, "Your daddy asked me to come work on the fence down yonder and drop off this load a' pipe. Where should I drop 'em?"
I spoke up saying, "Just pile them over by the side of the barn" and then offered "You need any help?"
"No thank ya, boys, this here pipe can be a might heavy. I'll have 'er done in a second."
When he was done he said, "I'll be on the back side of the south forty acres, if your daddy shows up, let him know I'm a' working down there." We said we would, and he headed down to through the pasture to earn his day's pay.
Jay and I went back to looking for something to keep us occupied, and began pondering the newly formed pile of metal pipe. He said, "You know, I bet we could make a big old gun out of one of those pipes. We don't ever get to shoot our .22's unless our dads are around, and they don't let us shoot anything fun. Besides all you can shoot with .22's are rabbits and squirrels, this time we could make a really big gun. We'll set it up and go huntin' for an elk or somethin'." The fact that elk hadn't inhabited our portion of Kansas for several generations was a non-deterrent, and we both decided it would be a constructive way to use our time.
The engineering/planning period of the project went surprisingly fast. To be precise it took about thirty seconds, but would have gone a lot quicker without the dirt clod fight. We decided that by propping one end of the pipe on an old car jack and staking down the other end, we could get just about any trajectory that we needed. Besides that, we had complete access to my dad's reloading cabinet where the gun powder was stored, since about a year ago we learned to take the hinges off the door. Watch out elk!
Next was the construction phase of the project that began with me saying to Jay, "Which pipe should we use?" and him replying "Get the biggest one you can find. You can't shoot elk with a pee shooter." I grabbed a pipe about three inches wide and with the help of three full rolls of duct tape; we securely fastened a scrap piece of flat metal to one end. Then we needed to find a way to light the contraption so we found an old hand drill (damn that lock on the power tool shed) and began several tedious hours of drilling the hole manually. When completed, we had what looked like an industrial strength walking cane for someone twelve feet tall.
With all of that work, we decided that it was time to get something to eat before the testing phase began. We went inside the house and my mom fixed us couple of big ham sandwiches with mustard and lettuce and plopped down a big bowl of apples and oranges on the table.
Mom said, "My goodness, you boys are all sweaty. What in the world have you been up to?"
"We're building a gun so we can go elk huntin', Mom," I said.
Mom's head snapped around so fast a curler came unfastened, flying off her head and landing in the coleslaw. "Your not using power tools again, are you?" she said with a serious look.
"Nope, just using some pipe and duct tape," Jay said with a smile.
That seemed to relax her and she said, "Ok then, just be careful and stay away from the power tools."
After lunch, we positioned our new creation about fifteen feet away from an old hedge tree at a forty-five degree angle and secured it to both the car jack and ground. It had been decided that the first shot should be into the tree so that we could test the velocity and accuracy of the weapon and we chose a contraband orange that was lifted at lunch as the test projectile. Next we popped the top on the gun powder barrel and began pouring it in. It sure seemed like a long time before Jay said it was enough, but maybe it was just pouring slowly. Besides, you don't want a pansy gun if you're going to try and shoot elk; we needed to know what this thing could do.
The dilemma of who would ignite the first shot then presented itself. To ignite the gun, a match had to be stuck through a small hole bored in the back of the pipe. This seemed easy enough, but the task required this person be directly behind the gun during the firing. Through an uncharacteristic show of graciousness, Jay offered me the privilege. However, I was adamant that he should have the honor and glory that would come with a successful first firing. We finally settled on taping a match to a broken broom handle before lighting the powder. That would give us some distance from the gun if anything went wrong, and for added protection, we decided to pull around Dad's lawn tractor to hide behind during the operation.
The moment of truth was upon us, it was time to see what this baby could do. As we crouched behind the lawn tractor, Jay taped a match to the end of the broom handle and struck it on the box to light it. It flared to life, and he quickly stretched the handle towards the firing hole and stuck it in.
For a second, nothing happened. Then the end of the pipe seemed to catch on fire as the last two feet of the gun barrel disintegrated and a fire ball the size of a round bale of hay erupted from where the end of the gun used to be. The sound was deafening and the hedge tree bent backward from the force of the blast, swaying as it snapped back. Bark and leaves were flying everywhere and the air was filled with the smell of burnt gun powder and charred wood. The orange we had stuffed in the barrel must have missed the tree entirely since we saw a projectile fly out the back side of the tree and keep sailing in the same general trajectory as the blast.
Jay and I looked at each other with astonishment for a second and then he let out an enthusiastic, "WHOOO HOOO". At least I think that's what he said; it was hard to hear over the ringing in my ears. Then the magnitude of what we had just done overcame us both and we began yelling, dancing and carrying on. That lasted until we saw my mom marching briskly towards us with a look on her face that did not encourage celebration.
After Mom gave us both an earful about the dangers of playing with gunpowder, and threatening me with the consequences that would be passed down when my father got home, she insisted that we both go the emergency room to have the doctor take a look at us. Although Jay and I were both sure that the burns would heal and our hearing would return to normal, moms are just overly careful like that.
As we both sat in the waiting room, I was shocked and astonished when my father walked through the emergency room entrance. If he had come all the way to the hospital to give me a whoopin,' I was in bigger trouble than I thought. Then I noticed he was half carrying a guy in a denim shirt and dirty jeans. As they got closer, I recognized him as the farm hand that had dropped off the pipes earlier that day. He looked terrible, his face and lips were red and swollen tight with deep, bloody scratches all over his cheeks and scalp.
Dad handed off the man to the doctor and nurses and then came to sit down by my mother. She said, "Good Lord, what happened to him?"
"It's the strangest thing, I went to go check on him when I got home from work and found him laying flat on his back out cold. I thought he was sleeping with his hat shading his face, but I went to go wake him up and there was a big old dead squirrel sort of clamped onto his head like that thing in the movie Alien. When I finally woke him up, he just wouldn't make any sense. All he kept babbling about was flying squirrels and every once in a while he'd point to the sky, scream "Look Out", and dive under the pickup. I don't know how it happened but that squirrel had a death grip on his face like it was holding on for dear life. If I hadn't of had to peel the squirrel off of his head, I'd fire him for drinking on the job." Then he had a moment of realization and said, "Hey, what are you guys doing at the hospital?"
After some serious interrogation, Jay and I had to admit that what we had mistaken for our orange flying out of the tree was really an unsuspecting squirrel that was about to go on the flight of his life. The farm hand recovered nicely but rarely ever came by the house again. When he did come to pick up his paycheck, he kept looking up into the sky and flinching constantly. It was distracting to carry on a conversation with him.
Despite all of the commotion, Jay and I considered our project a success. We had destroyed a perfectly good pipe, nearly killed a tree, rendered a car jack unusable, burned a ten foot wide circle in the pasture, burned most of our hair off, killed a squirrel, scorched all the paint of one side of Dad's lawn tractor, damaged our hearing, and almost decapitated a man with a terminal velocity squirrel. Aside from all of that, we set out to make a gun for elk hunting, and based on the test run, I just know it would have done the job.
J.S. Jones
Got some feedback for him?
response 1 Updated 04/06/06
John,
I'm enjoying your stories. Laughed my butt off as I read this story. It
sounds so much like something my brother and I did in the late 60's . . .
Dad was stationed at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and did a
lot of shooting at the base trap and skeet range. Naturally, to keep
costs down, he loaded his own shotgun shells. Needless to say, there
was a good supply of powder on hand.
I had been out to the base rifle range with the Boy Scouts, where we
were allowed to fire, under close supervision, M16 rifles. 10 rounds on
semi-automatic and 10 rounds on full auto. Boy, those zipped out! Talk
about Boy Scouts being in Seventh Heaven. There were many unique
opportunities afforded Scouts on a military base! Being the avid
collector of junk that I was, I picked up several empty rounds of .223
and brought them home.
My brother and I decided it would be fun to reload an M16 round and fire
it off in the back yard. Somehow, we managed to remove the old primer.
Of course, a shotgun primer wouldn't fit a .223 round, but we'd make
do. The shell was tightly loaded with powder and a pencil was jammed
down into the neck. We took this contraption out behind the house and
set it at the base of a tree. More powder in the primer hole and a, not
long enough, trail of powder for a fuse (by the way, powder burns VERY
fast). We lit that powder fuse and ran as far as we could, being not
very far, before there was a tremendous BANG! Being the naive kids we
were, we went back looking to find the shell that had shot a pencil out
the end. We even had concerns that we might have hit a neighboring
house. There was nothing but a small blast hole to be found!
It occurred to me much later in life that something like a 'BREECH'
might contain and focus a blast in such a way as to shoot a projectile
and that we probably created a small, fragmentation bomb instead. How
we avoided the shrapnel, I'll never know.
Of course, there was the time I traded my brothers good church shoes to
a little Phillippino boy on the other side of the base perimeter fence .
. . Would you believe you could get a real, unexploded bomb for a pair
of shoes?! I got the best end of the deal when I traded it to Alan
Rolag for a big 7.62mm ammo box. He ended up with an EOD detail
confiscating his bomb and taking it out to the range to be exploded!
John
Some people are like Slinkies...
Not really good for anything... but they still bring a smile to your
face when you push them down a flight of stairs.
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