I don't know whether I will go opening day or wait until later in the week. I have a little sweet spot fixed up. Nothing illegal, just a patch of millet and sorghum. I'm going to take a friend I have been neglecting for a while, and try to get reacquainted.
The friend is a Parker Bros. Trojan Model 20 gauge shotgun. My Great Uncle Perk Harris bought it new in 1916. He and my Daddy hunted together in the 40s and 50s. Perk had no sons, and when he died, his wife gave the gun to Daddy. I learned to hunt with the old Parker, not realizing that it was a fairly valuable piece. By the time I was 12 or 13, it was "my" shotgun. When I was running the paper route in high school, the old Parker rode with me. I needed it for snakes and varmints and such, don't you know?
From the early-1960s through the late 1970s, I was lucky enough to get in on the tail end of the real good quail hunting in Georgia. The Parker was/is the quintessential quail gun, seeming to just jump up to my shoulder and naturally level on the bird. I hunted with it as my only shotgun for many years, but the lure of the semi-automatic soon got the best of me.
In the early 70s I traded an early stainless S&W for an absolutely beautiful Browning Sweet Sixteen with 26-inch barrel and Improved Cylinder choke. It was an absolute quail killing machine. I more or less retired the old Parker after that, preferring the three shots of the semi-automatic. By the late 70s, we (my brother Sandy and I) were out of dogs, and the quail were quickly disappearing. We weren't really duck hunters, and we didn't have the means or time to travel to exotic places for the wing shooting, so the shotguns were pretty much relegated to the occasional dove shoot.
There are two memories of the old Parker that stand out in my mind. I killed the first quail I ever shot at when I was about 11 or 12 years old. I was walking through a weedy patch with the Parker, behind my Grandparents' house about half way up the north side of Whitewater Hill. Just me, no dog or companion. A single quail got up from right under my feet, the old Parker came up, and the bird folded. My hunt was an immediate success. No sport on an African Safari or an exotic bird hunt in some foreign land was ever more proud than I was of that bird. I retrieved the bird and immediately took it back to my Granny, who helped me clean it and cooked it for my dinner. This would have been during Thanksgiving Holidays, probably in 1959 or 1960.
The other would have been some time in the early/middle 70s. Sandy and I were hunting with Tommy Neely. Sandy had a brand-spanking new Belgian Browning Auto-5. Tommy had a Browning Superposed, what grade I don't know. I had the old Parker. We turned the dog out and within 50yards he locked up on point. The birds held tight, and when they flushed, we all emptied our guns. Sandy and Tommy didn't cut a feather with their five shots. I had clean kills on a double. As Jake (the dog) brought the birds to me, I heard Tommy mutter to Sandy, "Damn a man that outshoots you with a 60 year old shotgun."
About 25 years ago I decided to have the gun "re-done." This could have turned out to be a disaster, but luckily for me, it turned out real well because of a couple of local craftsmen. I took the gun to Clark Freeland. He rust-blued the barrels and ordered new wood. It turned out that the wood was a poor fit, and Clark wouldn't let me pay him anything. He did a superb job of rust-bluing the barrels, no small feat. The gun went back in the closet. A few years later, after seeing the work Thomas Parks did on the wood of another old shotgun, I took him the original wood. He called me a couple of weeks later to come get the gun. He had glued the stock where it had split, and put in a couple of pins to help hold it together. The result was a very attractive job that makes limited use of the old gun very possible. I ordered a case of low pressure 2.5 inch shells to use instead of the standard pressure 2.75 inch shells available over the counter.
So I'm going to take the old girl hunting again. A half dozen birds would be a good thing, and a limit of doves would be wonderful, but just having this old gun in the field again is a reward in itself.
Taking a 95 Year Old Friend to the Dove Field
Good post Redlevel. Have fun in the dove fields this year. Don
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