Curtis - Sporting Firearms of Today in Use : a Look Back at the Guns and Attitudes of the 1920s--and Why They Still Matter

First Published in 1922
First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Richard Rossiter

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-470-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-789-0

Printed in the United States of America

CORRECT POSITION WITH THE PISTOL .

Arm fully extended, but not stiff, body well balanced, feet at right angles, thumb high on grip.

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T HERE is a worn and discolored leather-bound volume, with tarnished gilt edges, in my bookcase, that is a cherished possession, My Game Registera gift from a splendid old British sportsman, who gave it to me as a boy, with the advice to keep in it always a record of clean sport which I would be proud to look back upon in the days to come.

Once in a while on a blustery day, when the air is keen and has that tang to it which creeps into every sportsmans blood, with an insidious cunning, making him forget the crowds and the noisy city streets about him and picture in their stead the stubble fields, with their many-colored backgrounds of frost-tinted hardwoods, or dreary expanses of lonely marshland, with the wind whistling through the sedge. I will go home disconsolately, with a longing in my heart, as does every sportsman cursed with a vivid imagination, which nothing can appease but a day afield under the autumn skies.

So, I will light a pipe and settle back in my easy chair with the dear old book upon my knee, to dream again those cherished memories of vanished days. Days that will never be lived again, no matter how promising the future in store for me, they carried away with them the boyhood enthusiasm and left in its stead the calmer appreciation of mature years. I turn back the first pages, scrubby, yellow, written in the scrawling, misspelled hand of a small boy and glance over the meagre record of game bagged.

I see before me a vision of a yellow-wheeled dogcart, jolting along a country road, with a stout red-faced Englishman driving the stouter dobbin in the shafts, a lean Yankee beside him with a kindly gray eye. Under the seat on which a small boy was sitting, in a gunning coat many sizes too large for him, two perfect pointers were lying, trying their best to sleep, after a gruelling day afieldthe last of the season when the birds were scarce and wild. The boy was tired too, but oh, so happy, for the bird on his lap, which he fondly stroked, was his first killed on the wingand a cock pheasant at thattaken from under the noses of the two best shots in the township.

It was an epoch!!

The boy had passed one of the great milestones in his life.

I slowly turn a few more pages, each representing a year gone by, each filled with a host of memories of the past which awaken into vivid pictures at the prompting of a few words set down so long ago.

I see a bleak expanse of marshland on a bitter December evening when the wind was blowing a gale and whipping the bay into a latherWhat a night for black duck! The boy who had filled out into a lean, wiry lad, crouched in the thatch on a turn in the stream which meandered through the meadow. Suddenly he bent low and the blood pulsed warmly through his shivering body, as he spied a pair of birds slowly beating up the wind, wearily seeking a place to light.When almost over him they bounce, towering into the air and turning back, with a quack that was almost drowned by the wind. The gun goes to his shoulder and as the flame shoots out into the dusk with an angry red gleam one of the pair crumples and falls away. The record shows that two more were added to the bag that night on Colgates Marsh, and a pair of broad-bill that crossed the Neck ahead of him on the seven-mile walk home were added to the score.

I see him again, grown to a man, silently slipping through the woodland, rifle in hand on a frosty October morning. There is a crash and a deer bounds into view, tearing away through the underbrush, his white flag glistening in the sunlighta sharp report rings out on the frosty stillness, resounding through the forest and echoing back and forth from hill to hill, as the buck springs convulsively into the air and falls.

I see him tramping through the corn stubbles of the South, with a brace of pointers and again in the hills of New England after grouse. I see him in a blind on the Chesapeake, waiting for redheads, and again on a far Northern barren standing over his first moose.

I turn a few more pages, one by one, each showing a larger bag due to greater skill, more opportunities, and wider experience. The progress has continued up, until the last few pagesas proficiency still balances against depleted game fields that have been carelessly neglected and never replenished. The tide must turn in a few years, and the records in my game register will start to descend the scale.

But no matterif we can impart a little to others from the experience we have gained in the past we have warranted the opportunities given to us. Perhaps I can assist in setting the feet of some young Nimrod on the path to good sportsmanship. Perhaps I can stimulate a desire, awaken a slumbering instinct to become a follower of Diana. And if by chance I should, I might better yet, through the following pages, be the means of helping over some of those obstacles which retard proficiency. If so, I am repaid.

It has been aptly said that the preface is but an excuse for the existence of the book; hence this explanation. Herein is not a scientific treatise on modern gunnery. Ye cranks, who crave the satisfactory explanation of the deepest ballistic problems, pass on! You will not find it here. The old standard works on shooting are sadly out of date, in view of the rapid development in firearms, and those of more recent origin are mostly composed of the catalogue data of our firearms manufacturers brought together in one volume and garnished with the familiar wood-cuts and plates from the same source, the reading of which cannot be other than dry and stale to the practical sportsman or the novice to whom the tables of rifle ballistics are at least confusing, and shotgun construction is not of interest beyond the results which are attained by it. For those who wish to go into the history of arms and ammunition and study its development from the dim past to the present there is ample literature both by American and European writers. There are no ballistic tables herein, no advice for the target shooter or the trap shooter; either will find plenty of men along the firing line more competent to give it under such conditions. No dissertations on what to take, what to wear, or how to campit is taken for granted that most of those who read this have already pored over other volumes on such subjects. It is believed that the average sportsman is far more interested in the practical results obtained in the field on game with modern arms than in all the range experiments and laboratory tests that can be conducted in the next decade. Consequently, I have confined my efforts to the most modern weapons, the most popular controversies which have been waged in the immediate past in the sporting periodicals, or if old topics have been touched upon it has been from a different angle than those which we have seen in print.