Ten Guns: Memories of a Weaponized Childhood, by Charles Sawyer

My demographic is not known for its love of guns.  I live in up-scale suburban Boston, worked in high tech (33 years, 9 companies, laid-off 5 times), call myself a "Yellow Dog Democrat," one who'd vote for a yellow dog before he'd vote for a Republican. Yet once upon a time you could find me in the show ring of a county fair, wearing 4-H whites and wrestling with an uncooperative heifer, hoping that the judges wouldn't mark us down too severely for the vestigial manure stains on her white flanks.  (Sawyer's Blueing could only go so far.)

Listening to the stream of news articles and op-ed pieces on guns and gun legislation has taken me back to those days when guns were knit into our lives.  Now I listen and read with a sense of unreality as people huff and puff about constitutional rights, sportsmanship and self-protection.  Missing from the conversation is the primal fact that guns are killing machines.  Missing is a sense of wonder that our culture should have embraced a device whose purpose is to slay.  Has blood lust become our creed?  So I look to my distant past for clues.

1. Muzzle-loading flintlock.  America's gun culture has left its mark on me: I could tell the story of my early life as a series of guns, owned, inherited, maintained, and conserved.  This very moment there is a long gun in my bedroom closet. It's a family heirloom so I don't think of it as a firearm.  It has been in my family for over 200 years. From earliest memory this gun hung over the fireplace, a totem that said this family has been gun lovers since the days when guns were loaded through the muzzle.  Not only that, there were two powder horns on display hanging down below, full with gunpowder, one on either side of the fireplace. How unsafe: explosives stored feet from open flame. How very phallic: the full three-piece set clustered around the family hearth.

That gun, manufactured in London in the late 18th century, was a work of craftsmanship, a muzzle-loading flintlock, with ramrod slung below the barrel. We had a family tradition of firing the gun on the Fourth of July.  We took it out on the porch and loaded the barrel with gunpowder and toilet paper for wadding. No ball, just the charge and the wadding.  Dad would prime the flash pan with some gunpowder.  The trick was to ignite that powder with a spark from the ancient piece of flint fixed in the hammer.  The flash in the pan would travel through a little hole to the main charge at the base of the barrel.  It was a simple sequence, in principle: you pull the trigger, the hammer falls, strikes flint against steel; spark shoots down on flash pan powder; flame travels sideways to main charge; boom.

A simple mechanical problem made the discharge highly unpredictable:  the flint was old and wouldn't spark most times; even then the spark might not land in the flash pan. Most times the old family flintlock wouldn't fire.  After each misfire we'd re-cock the hammer, reset the flash pan cover, then try again; and again, sometimes 20 or 30 times.  The anticipation became unbearable before the great, throaty boom would echo through the yard and the shower of flaming toilet paper would spew across the lawn.  By this annual ritual did we at once demonstrate our patriotism and assert our family identity.  [Our patriotism was more publicly expressed by attendance at regular meetings of the Sons of the American Revolution.]

In his will my father directed that any firearms he might possess should go to his son.  He died in 1982 from septicemia acquired in a hospital stay.  Thus, have I become the custodian of this relic that connects me to my ancestors in arms.

The idea of marksmanship as a display of prowess goes back to my early childhood.  Dad and I had a stunt we performed for any willing audience.  He would strike a wooden kitchen match and hold it up between his fingers, steadying it from below with his thumb.  I would take aim with a toy gun, or just my fingers made into a gun.  With ceremony I would fire and, magically, the flame would go out, poof, aided by a flick of Dad's thumb.  It never failed to produce applause and laughter.  His glee was ever apparent.  We bonded over imaginary gunfire.

2. 22-caliber single-shot bolt-action rifle.  As a kid of 8 or 10 I would take target practice with my father, using a single-shot, bolt-action .22 caliber rifle.  It had a peep sight, a disk with a pinhole to peep through, which made it slightly exotic.  I was allowed to fire this weapon only after a thorough training in gun safety.  Never have a loaded gun in the house...Treat all guns, empty or loaded, as if they are loaded...Never, never point a gun at a person--any gun, even a toy gun...When holding a weapon always follow its aim point.  No exceptions allowed. 

Our target range was the back yard.  Living on a farm we had nothing behind the house but a hayfield and a tall hill.  Naturally, one had to be quite sure no one was wandering around back there before opening fire.  Targets were tin cans or blocks of wood, and, occasionally, a paper target.  Never any glassware. Shooting bottles was for the movies. From earliest time marksmanship was the goal and my prowess was a mark of pride and a demonstration of manhood.  As I got better, Dad gave me smaller and smaller targets.  A penny at 50 feet was a prize target.  There were candles to shoot out.

3. Multi-shot, slide-action, 22-caliber rifle, my first gun. Through these years of "plinking" there was the promise and lure of my 12th birthday, when, I was assured, I would receive my very own gun, a .22, it was assumed.  As the day, July 2, 1953, approached I began to worry that Dad would find the purchase beyond our means.  Not that such a gun would cost a fortune, but it would be quite beyond the cost of, say, a cap gun, which had been my birthday present a few times, starting, I seem to recall in 1947, when I received a gleaming replica of a six-gun that used roll caps, 50 shots per roll.  Nothing quite compared for primal pleasure than the smell that wafted up from a blazing cap gun.  Olfactory memories are among the most potent and even today I would swoon at a hint of that sensation. 

The cost of a multi-shot .22 rifle was somewhere in the low $20-range.  My concern about my father's resolve and his means reached a fever and I took action.  I approached my father standing in the kitchen and thrust my hand in his pants pocket, leaving a wad of dollar bills, around 8 I recall, muttering something about how I knew the cost of my treasured prize was more than slight and I wanted to contribute.  I don't remember how my father reacted to this effort to force his hand and guarantee my gun be delivered on 7/2, but I remember he was more or less passive.  I half expected him to refuse my contribution.  I can imagine he might have been humiliated, but he hid it, if he was.

Being a lever-action, single-shot design lent the Ballard more to target shooting than to hunting.  But if you wanted to try a very long shot at a small target the heavy-barreled Marlin Ballard was not a bad choice.  We had one such target that appeared from time to time 200+ yards up the hill behind the barn: a plump woodchuck. Woodchucks were varmints who marauded vegetable gardens and dug holes in the hay fields, holes that were a deadly hazard to horses.  A running horse might break a leg if it stepped into a woodchuck hole, and we had horses, work horses and saddle horses.  When we saw a woodchuck grazing outside his den, we'd reach for the Ballard.  Hitting a woodchuck at that distance was a challenge, but I tried.  The Ballard had a peep sight that flipped up from the stock and was fitted with a turn screw to raise and lower it.  Setting the elevation of the sight was pure guess work.  To take my shot I would drop down the lever, which doubled as a trigger guard, and chamber a brass round, 32 caliber with a 40 grain load.  The furry target was just a brown smudge against the beige hay stubble.  There was no need for subterfuge at that distance, so I could take my time and get a good, steady aim, especially if I used the big outdoor rack for drying milk cans to steady the barrel.  When I pulled the trigger there was a slight delay between the report and the puff of dust where the round landed, never closer than 3 or 4 feet from the grazing animal.  Invariably the woodchuck made a dash for his hole and disappeared.

Bagging the varmint had an obvious solution: sneak up on the critter.  A frontal assault was impossible because you can't sneak up across 200 yards of open field.  But approaching from the rear, down over the crest of the hill, might work.  In frustration over the failure of the long-shot approach I resolved on this plan at the next opportunity.  I set off with the Ballard slung over my arm and a few shells in my pocket.  My father waited in the yard with his binoculars.  After a long, roundabout walk I came to the last obstacle, a stone wall and barbed wire fence, which I stepped over cautiously.  Only then did I chamber a 32-40 round in the Ballard.  A few more quiet steps and I was over the crest of the hill and the animal was in sight.  I was confident that the woodchuck could not see me, even against the sky, if I stood perfectly still.  So long as I moved only while he was head down, chomping on hay stubbles, I could approach to where I might have a chance to nail him.  He was predictable, switching between eating and watching for predators.  I fell into a rhythm with him.  Head-down/creep, head-up/freeze.

Using this technique I closed the distance to 50-75 feet.  I would have moved even closer had he not detected danger and bolted for his hole.  No chance to get off a shot before he would disappear down his hole, so I stayed stock still.  A few feet before reaching his front door he froze and looked straight at me.  There we were, hunter and prey, eyes fixed on each other, frozen in place.

My only chance for a shot was to bring the gun up so slowly he wouldn't notice.  Ever so slowly I began raising the gun to my shoulder.  The Ballard was a heavy gun, owing to its unconventional octagonal barrel--the only such shape I've ever seen.  It was a target gun, after all, not a hunting gun.  The drama of the moment was highlighted by having an audience, one loaded with emotional power: my father 200 yards down the hill, watching through binoculars.

Once I had the gun stock against my shoulder and my cheek alongside the sight I struggled to hold the gun steady after holding it up so long.  I squeezed the trigger and my shot rang out.  The bullet caught him somewhere in his midsection and he flopped over several times before coming to rest, dead as a doornail.  I carried the carcass down the hill toward my waiting father who greeted me with exclamations of triumph.  The varmint was vanquished, though the hazard of his den remained on the field of battle.

There was no thought of eating my prey, but I did want to open him up.  I used my hunting knife and slit his belly.  There among his organs was a bloated bladder.  Without thinking I stuck the point of my knife into it.  The stream that shot out squirted up my arm.  I thought it was a final irony that the dead animal pissed on me, as if in mortal revenge.

I don't remember what we did with the mutilated body.  Burial was a standard solution, but so also was pitching it into the manure piles in the barn cellar.  The cellar was a wretched place of decomposing waste.  No scavenger would dare cross the great pools of liquid waste that acted as a moat to the mounds of animal dung.

5. Cousin Don's Ithaca 20-guage shotgun. The back field was the scene of another violent incident involving my cousin Don Gove.  Cousin Don was a serious hunter, that is, he hunted traditional small game, like partridge and rabbit, and he did something practical with his quarry, like skin them or eat them.  He had a bird dog, an English setter named "Vickie." Don had a prized firearm, an Ithaca 20-guage, slide action shotgun that held 4 or 5 shells. Shooting skeet could be as exciting as hunting and you got to shoot a lot more when the targets were clay pigeons. The back field at the farm was an ideal place for skeet shooting.  The targets came in stacks wrapped in newspaper and boxed in sawdust or excelsior (packing material made of tiny ribbons of wood shavings).

One summer evening Don drove up with his Ithaca and a box of clay pigeons.  Dad had a special trap for launching them, more sophisticated than the simple hand trap most people used.  This evening four of us walked up into the back field to a spot well removed from the farm and barn, Don with his gun and box of targets, Dad with his trap, Sylvia, my sister, with a bowl of cereal, and me.

Dad's trap had a gun-stock that enabled you to aim the path of the missile.  It had a swivel-arm with a kind of claw at the end to hold the disc-shaped target, attached to a powerful spring.  To arm the trap you had to cock the swivel arm and fix it place with a latch, then fix the clay target in the jaw. ["clay" is a misnomer since the targets are made of a mixture of pitch and pulverized limestone.]  This contraption, with its gun stock and trigger that released the arm and flung out the target, allowed the trap operator to direct the target to the shooter's instruction, low and wide, high and close, whatever.

We encamped on a slope not far from the stone wall on the west side of the field.  Sylvia sat cross-legged, spooning her shredded wheat, or whatever it was, into her mouth while Dad settled into a routine of cocking the trap, placing a target in the jaw, and readying himself for Don's command.  Don was a good shot and he shattered most of the targets, sometimes on the second shot, sometimes on the first.  Some of the targets disintegrated coming out of the trap, but most of them flew true to Dad's aim.

Dad had settled on a procedure for cocking the arm and spring.  He placed the stock against the ground, forced the arm down to the latch-point and locked the latch.  The method worked well because he could bear his weight down against the powerful spring, until one time when he missed locking the latch.  When he let go of the arm it flew up and delivered a mighty upper cut to his jaw.  It knocked him back and he tumbled in the grass.  He looked up, dazed, and spat out a bloody mass that included at least one tooth.

Blood streamed off his upper lip and he pulled out at a handkerchief from this pocket.  He raised himself up, slowly, and began walking toward the farm house.  I tagged along at his side.  I knew he was hurt, but I didn't know how bad.  At least the force of the blow hadn't knocked him out.  As we walked he daubed the hanky on his mouth and looked at it a few times.  As we neared the house he muttered to me from under the cloth "Don't tell your mother."

I don't remember the exact sequence that followed, only that he went to the hospital for treatment.  His upper lip was badly chewed up, requiring several stitches.  Both jaws were broken, requiring the doctors to wire his jaws shut.  For days he drank from a straw, and spoke with clenched jaw.  Unable to shave, he sprouted a mustache, which surprised us when we saw his whiskers were reddish, not brown like his hair.

Eventually the wounds on his lip healed, the wires in his jaws came out and he resumed normal life.  That was the last skeet shoot at Jordan Farm.  Dad destroyed his fancy clay pigeon trap.

Bounty Hunters. Woodchucks weren't the only varmints.  Porcupines were a nuisance and a hazard for the dogs. There's something about a porcupine that dogs find irresistible.  That's the only explanation for the fact that our dog seemed never to learn to avoid them.  It happened more than a few times that he would show up after an absence of a few hours with his nose and cheeks bristling with embedded quills.  This could only mean that a standoff between dog and porcupine had ended with the dog biting the porcupine.  How else does a dog get quills stuck in the roof of his mouth?  You'd think they would learn.

Such a calamity would end up on the veterinarian's examining table, sometimes with the poor dog anesthetized, while the vet yanked the quills out, one by one, with a forceps.  We always comforted the dog while proclaiming, "Next time, use some sense."  It never worked.

I don't know the other ways in which these small, more or less nocturnal creatures got such a bad rap.  So bad was their reputation that the City of Concord passed an ordinance declaring a bounty of 25 cents for each proof of a porcupine kill, proof, by custom, being attested by presenting the animal's nose.  This put an entrepreneurial incentive behind the idea of killing this varmint.  Cousin Don knew this and he knew where to find a porcupine hangout, an almost mythical place called "Devil's Den."  It was said to be on a high hill variously known as "Jerry Hill" and "Mount Tom," located a mile from the farm at the south end of the mile-long city water supply, variously known as "Pennecook Lake" and "Long Pond."  Don knew how to find it.  In fact he'd been there and he swore it was the gathering place of tribes of porcupines.  A cave, full of quilled rodents with a price on their nose.  We planned an excursion as porcupine bounty hunters.

"Devil's Den" was a misnomer.  It was no den, just a cramped, rocky cave, 4 feet high at its highest and not more than 25 feet long.  To enter you had  to crouch down and waddle through the entrance into the dank space.  There were porcupines there, alright, wedged down in the recesses of their lair, none too happy with our presence.  They huddled in the recesses of the cave and looked back in terror when we shone our flashlights on them.  The ground outside was frozen, but inside it was clearly above freezing judging from the slippery stone slab we huddled on.  The floor was covered with soft dung.

As Don said, they weren't going to come when we called to them and there was no way to drive them out into the open, and, hence, to claim our bounty we would have to shoot them where they cowered and figure out how to pull their carcasses back.  We opened fire, me with my 22 target rifle, Don with his rifle.  The sound of gunfire in that small rock-walled cave was deafening.  But more gruesome was the sound the poor wounded creatures made, which evinced more gunfire to finish the job.

The smell was over powering, a mixture of porcupine shit and gun smoke and the gunfire left my ears ringing.

We did not come prepared for the problem of retrieving the carcasses of our prey so we struggled long and hard at cutting a sapling to fashion a pole with some branches near the top to act as a hook.  Some bodies were beyond recovery, but after several trips in and out of the cave and a lot of frustrating pole work we had about half a dozen dead porcupines lined up on the ground.  It took some tricky knife work to cut the noses off without getting stuck ourselves but when we trekked back down Mt. Tom we had a string of bounty noses. We left the bodies on the ground near the entrance to Devil's Den. Don generously donated his share of the bounty and we left the noses in a paper bag in the woodshed back at the farm.

Come Monday I went to City Hall with my bag of noses.  I told the clerk I had come for the porcupine bounty.

"How many do you have?" she asked, squeamishly.

"Six," I said, holding up the bag.  "Do you want to count them?"

"No, no, " she said in horror.  "I'll take your word for it. Put them on the floor over there, against the wall."

She filled out a receipt and gave me my bounty money, $1.50 in cash.

That was the last of my bounty hunting.

Looking back now, I'm amazed and appalled at the barbarism of it all.  Back then I took it in stride, thinking it was to be expected in such manly matters.  And I looked up to Don as second only to my father as the epitome of manliness.  But I didn't much like the whole business back then. True I was glad for the bragging rights won by the adventure on Mt. Tom.  There was a thrill of firing my gun as a weapon with lethal intent, albeit against a helpless, pathetic creature, under the most revolting conditions. We were hunters up on Mt. Tom and that was important to us.  By taking our weapons and going into the woods we entered into a state of mind with powerful evolutionary origins. Not only that, it was sanctioned and encouraged by society,  financially rewarded as a public service.

It may have been barbaric but a dairy farm, where I grew up, is a primitive place where creatures are born and die as a matter of routine.  Our neighbor's boy was a star athlete and once arrived too late for warm up practice before the game because he had been attending the birth of a calf.  In the dugout he changed into his uniform, shedding his bloody overalls, caked with bovine afterbirth.  Legend has it that he pitched a no-hitter that day.

Our mothers, Don's and mine, grew up together on that farm, but Don and I were the next generation and already partially emigrated toward middle class suburban living.  His family was very respectable.  His father was a podiatrist, a titled  Doctor, with an office just off Main Street.  They drove a Pontiac, which, in those days when cars announced your status, placed the family solidly in the upper middle class. Their license plate bore a little medallion that marked the car as belonging to a doctor who might be on his way to a medical emergency. The next notch up the economic ladder was Cadillac and Lincoln class.  Dad was a lawyer. In the 1940's when he was Clerk of Court, Dad drove Packards, but when he went into private law practice we slipped down a notch to Dodge class.

My  point, if I even have one, is that we are never far removed from the jungle.  However civilized we may think of ourselves, it's a small step back to gunfire in a slippery, foul cave.  Don went on to great heights.  He graduated from Harvard Dental School and practiced oral surgery in Portland, Maine, until his retirement.  I, too, have a Harvard degree, mine in computer science.  It's quite the contrast when you put us as we are now, retired oral surgeon and Google software engineer, beside the image of two boys crouched in a cave blasting away at defenseless rodents.

The Hand Guns.  Among the living room furniture in our various houses was an ornate cabinet, about 3 feet tall, that stood on legs and sported inlays of wood and ivory.  The bottom opened up with a swinging door, offering storage for tall things, liquor bottles mostly.  Above it was a drawer in which we kept playing cards, poker chips, cribbage boards and hand guns--four of them. They just lay there atop one another.  Two of them did not work at all and the working ones were never kept loaded.

6. The Lady's gun. There was a small, chrome hand gun, .32 caliber, with a pearl handle, which lay in a soft, chamois leather pouch with a snap clasp.  Something was missing, a firing pin, perhaps, and so we never fired it, never took it out of the house, took it out of its case only to show it off and admire it.  We referred to is as a "lady's gun," as if it were perfectly normal for ladies to be armed.

7. 38-caliber revolver. There was a .38 caliber revolver, also chrome, with black plastic grip, also never loaded, never fired.  It was one of two guns that Dad had acquired from the evidence storage at his Clerk of Court office in Woodsville, NH, county seat of Grafton County.  He never explained how he came to keep this and the other evidence gun at home.  Maybe the evidence storage at the courthouse was his own desk drawer and he considered the liquor cum gun cabinet was a kind of annex to the court storage. Maybe he purchased the guns from the Court. I suppose he might have pinched them, but that would seem out of character.  He never said much about it.   Woodsville, like the name suggests, is a backwater town which owed its slight prominence to the fact that three rivers and two rail lines intersected there.

This 38 revolver and the .32 caliber automatic had been murder weapons in trials held in Grafton County.  Each gun had a story, which Dad told, matter-of-factly.  The revolver had killed a woman.  The defendant was said to have approached the victim, who was sitting down, from behind, thrust the gun down on her shoulder next to her neck, and fired.  The bullet traveled down through her torso, killing her.  The outcome of the trial and any sentence that might have been passed on the defended are lost in time.

8. 32-caliber automatic.  The German-made automatic had a rich story, often repeated.  At the trial the defendant told his story to the jury from the witness stand.  The victim was a single woman, living in a cabin in the woods with her two children.  As the defendant told it he visited her that day with the intent of giving her the pistol "for protection."  Standing in the yard, he explained, he pulled the gun from his left hip pocket and handed it to her.  In doing so his handkerchief fell to the ground, slightly behind him.  He turned and bent down to pick up the fallen handkerchief, heard a loud noise and then nothing, until he came to and examined himself and the surroundings.  He was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head.  The woman lay beside him on the ground, dead, with a wound in her chest.

The narrative presented by the defense described these events as attempted murder (of the defendant by the victim) followed by suicide of the victim.  The defense reasoned she shot him in the head and turned the gun on herself.  One thing was beyond dispute: a bullet had entered his right temple and exited from the bridge of his nose on the opposite side, leaving him blind in his right eye. The defendant, with a patch over his right eye, made a pitiful sight on the witness stand.

That would have been a plausible defense had it not been for the testimony of the victim's two children, who had been at home at the time of the shooting and who testified for the prosecution.  Each said they saw the shooting from the woodshed.  There had been a terrible quarrel, and the defendant drew the gun and shot their mother in the chest, then put the gun to his head and shot himself.  The prosecution played it as murder and attempted suicide, botched by the defendant whose self-inflicted gun shot was poorly aimed.

I was incredulous the first time I heard the jury verdict: not guilty.

"But why, Dad, the kids saw it and told how it happened?" I asked, pleading for a reasonable explanation of justice derailed. His explanation was the sort that adults readily accept but youngsters find completely inadequate.

"First, the children had strong motivation to misrepresent the facts in defense of their mother, who was portrayed by the prosecution as a callous murderer.  Second, children's testimony is always taken less credibly than adult testimony.  Third, and most importantly, the jury figured the man had been punished enough with the loss of his sight in one eye.  Besides, the jury considered the woman to be something of a whore with little bastards running around."

We used to fire this gun, a .32 caliber automatic, at targets.  It was highly inaccurate and had a tendency to jam when the shell failed to clear the chamber and got stuck in the eject port, something I believe is called "stove piping".  It had a distinguishing feature which figured in the trial.  It's safety release was built into the back of the grip, enabling the shooter to release the safety merely by squeezing the grip hard.  The defendant testified that the safety was on when the gun was in his pocket, but that he unintentionally released it when he handed the gun off to the victim,  when he squeezed the grip.

The story lent an emotional power to the gun itself.  This weapon had killed one person and wounded another.  When you fired it you couldn't help but connect to its deadly history.

8. 38-caliber automatic. The fourth gun in the gun drawer was my father's .38 caliber automatic.  This was the gun we used for hand gun target practice.  It was heavier than the 32, all metal, blue steel, reliable, more accurate than the lighter gun, but still so unpredictable as to banish any thought of relying on it for defense at any range greater that about 6 feet.  There was a leather holster for it.

The Shotguns. There were three shotguns in our armory.  One was antique, a 10 gauge double-barreled shotgun with twin triggers and twin external hammers.  We never fired it, never had any shells for it, 10-gauge shells being unavailable in the local gun shops.  I recall it as exotic, being from an earlier era altogether.  The hammers made a particularly satisfying snap when I pulled the trigger.  I can almost feel the vibration of its hammers in my muscle memory today as I remember it.  Odd how these tiny details of sensation, tactile, auditory, olfactory, can stay with you for a lifetime.

9. 12 guage, twist steel shotgun.  My father's main shotgun was a 12-gauge, double barreled gun, no hammers, which made for smooth lines of the breach end. A slide latch on the stock broke the breach open to accept shells. On the rare occasion when Dad would go out hunting, always by himself, he would carry that gun, open at the breach, slung over his arm.  I don't recall him ever firing it because it was not to be trusted with modern ammunition, its barrel being made of "twist steel."  The steel itself was of Damascus type. The barrel was formed by twisting alternate strips of steel together and welding the strands around a rod. The shells from the twist steel era were loaded with black powder.  Later ammunition used smokeless powder that burned slower and built up much higher tube pressure.  Twist steel barrels and modern ammunition were an unsafe combination. Still, Dad would go out with that gun draped over his arm.

10. Single-shot 20-guage shotgun. The last firearm from our collection was my 20-guage, single shot, shotgun, purchased with my own funds around the age of 14.  I fired it very seldom and never at any actual game, but it was a potent symbol of my growing maturity.  I carried this gun on my one concrete hunting adventure. It happened in the woods beyond the high pasture, a remote part of the land that made up the farm of John Jordan, my great grandfather, founder of the clan from which I came. It was deer season, mid-December, and I went out with cousin Don, armed with my shotgun and 20 gauge shells packed with deer slugs, i.e. instead of bird shot, each shell had a single projectile, a lead slug that might bring a deer down.

It was early afternoon when Don and I agreed to separate and prowl different corners of the woods. I trekked in a ways, tramping over ice-crusted snow.  Then I saw what could only be deer tracks.  Naturally I followed them.  I stopped and listened.  I heard faint sounds of crumbling snow crust coming through the fog-bound trees.  I resumed following the tracks, more quickly now.  I stopped and listened again, heard the same crunching sounds, then silence.  This could only be a deer, doing as I was doing, forging on, stopping, listening for the other's foot falls.  I realized I was in pursuit of a live, breathing, sentient being.  Once I came upon a depression in the snow where he had lain down to rest.  Fresh droppings lay atop the crust of snow.  ["He"? I couldn't know the deer's gender, but in my imagination it was a buck, not a doe.]  We, the deer and I, were locked in a dance that could prove fatal if I caught up with him.

I realized I was deep in the woods and lost.  The light was slowly fading.  Would Don be looking for me, I wondered? I wrote my initials in yellow in the snow, in case he might be following.  I wasn't worried, really.  These woods were never more than a few miles from populated places so even if it got dark before I broke out, I could probably manage.  I forged on. This pursuit put me in a state of mind I'd never known (and never known since), the pursuit of large game.  My weapon was modern, but the psychology was ancient. Would I be up to the challenge, if I got close enough for a shot?  I never learned because I came to a stone wall, beyond which was a wall of white--more snowy woods, I presumed, until I crossed the stone wall and found myself standing on a paved road.  Standing just down the road was cousin Don.  My hunt was over.

In Junior High School all boys took Industrial Arts, a.k.a. shop.  It was my favorite class.  I was good with my hands and loved working the materials, loved the smell of sawdust and the faint trails of smoke that the drill press gave off.  After making some simple artifacts, a breadboard for the kitchen, a broom holder for the cellar stairs, I was allowed a more ambitious project: a gun rack for my bedroom. I would sleep with my guns on display.  It took many weeks of cutting, sanding, assembling, reinforcing with dowels, and staining a rich walnut color to finish my project.  I don't remember what grade I got for it, but I was very satisfied with the way it looked and would look on my wall. 

Installing the rack was a challenge because it would be fastened to the wall by screws seated in the studs behind the drywall.  Studs were known to be 16 inches apart and the rack was barely 20 inches wide.  Finding them was a rare skill that neither my father nor I had acquired.  We bought a little stud-finder tool at the hardware store.  It had a clear plastic tube with steel balls.  The instructions said to place the butt end of the tube against the wall and tap the nearby wall nearby.  When the tube is over a stud, the directions said, the force of the blow should bump the balls out.  A wonderful idea, whose implementation was less clear than the directions would lead you to expect.  In fact the behavior of the balls was quite inconsistent.  Just when you thought you had found a stud the balls stood still, or they jumped across positions much wider than a stud might be.  We might as well have used a dowsing rod, an ancient instrument thought to find water.  We had, in fact, employed a dowser or two to choose the spot to drill our well with very disappointing results.

We selected a spot we believed to be over a stud according to our tool and began drilling.  After  a short penetration the drill plunged through.  No stud.  We drilled another one about 3/4 of an inch east of our first hole.  No stud. 3/4 inch more, no stud.  Thus we marched across the wall in small steps, leaving a trail of useless holes until around 15 inches from the first empty hole we hit solid wood.  Fortunately the top of the rack, cut into a flowing shape, was ample enough to cover the evidence of our ineptitude.

There is a famous father-son story about Steve Jobs and the advice his father gave him about crafting the backs of fences and cabinets. "He loved doing things right, " Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaason, "he even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see."  If my story of hanging the gun rack with my father has a moral it might be this: if you're lucky you'll be able to cover your own mistakes from the eyes of others and then don't lie awake obsessing over your own ineptitude.  I must say, though, that I couldn't look at that gun rack without remembering that it covered up a series of holes drilled in the false hope that the next one would find a stud.

Thus did I spend my remaining years until I finally moved out of my father's house, sleeping beside my gun collection.  I even lost my virginity under the protection of my father's Ballard, my 22 target rifle and my 20 gauge shotgun, with ample ammunition deployed along the bottom shelf of the rack.

Fortunately, none of these episodes led to genuine tragedy.  No one died, no one was maimed, not counting the one-eyed defendant, that is.  But there was one close call, or vaguely close call when I might have shot my uncle.

It happened one summer day that I looked out the back window of the kitchen pantry, the window that faced the hayfield field behind the farmhouse. I saw something I couldn't quite make out in the tall hay, about a hundred feet up the hill.  It was moving, but I couldn't see what it was.  It was a kind of jumble of shapes, brown and white.  I stared at it.  Every now and then it shifted. It baffled and disturbed me.  Life on the farm gave me, even as a boy, a sharply territorial sense.  The boundaries of the farm land, even those discontinuous tracts, like the "Call Lot," up on Via Tranquilla, now the home of the founders of Stonyfield Farms, were marked by stone walls and, sometimes, by barbed wire fences. 

I pondered this alien, amorphous jumble of shapes in the distant grass.  I was a boy of 10 or 12 with scant experience to judge anomalous input. Could it be a wild animal?  What kind of wild animal would lie about in our hayfield?  A big cat, escaped from a zoo? Concord had no zoo.  A traveling circus?  I hadn't heard of any.  The thing was that this strange visual phenomenon just didn't look human.  But if it were human, who could it be?  We had two state institutions within a few miles, both full of menacing characters, the New Hampshire State Prison, less than two miles on the far side of the hill, and the New Hampshire State Hospital, at 105  Pleasant Street, one mile away.

There were no adults around to consult.  With a sense of dread, I took out the 38-55 rifle and loaded some rounds into it.  Now my boyish fantasies began to drive my behavior.  What should I do?  Evidently, calling the police never entered my head. I remember that at one point I contemplated shooting this thing, this writhing, shape shifting, menacing creature in the grass.  I considered aiming to the side and firing a warning round.  These strange and possibly deadly scenarios went through my mind with no adult opinion to bear on them.  I decided to approach through the tall hay, gun in hand.

I walked across the back yard and started up through the tall hay, not exactly stalking the menace but ready to raise my gun if the shape coalesced into a real threat.  I must have been about 50 feet from the spot when the shapes came the recognizable form of Uncle Joe, lying on his back in the tall hay, holding up a newspaper.  My stomach churned into a knot.  Joe looked up and acknowledged me.  I tried to pretend that I was just out for a stroll, albeit armed with a high powered rifle in one hand.

Uncle Joe, sprawled in the hay, under the mid-day sun, reading a newspaper, was hard to fathom, beyond imagination if you knew Joe at all. He was not a pastoral type and the hayfield was a place of sweat and back breaking work, not a lounge for reading.  And for a few minutes I considered shooting at the undecipherable form he presented.  Makes me cringe just recollecting it.

There is one last story to tell of my life with guns.  When my college roommate visited my home I decided to make good on my claims as a marksman.  I took my 22 target rifle down from my gun rack, picked up a box of shells and called him to the front porch.  I pointed to a branch near the top of a nearby tree, perhaps 30 feet away.  "Watch it," I told him, "keep your eye on it."  I aimed for the branch and fired.  The branch snapped off and fell.  "Lucky shot," said roomy.  As it happened the branch had caught on its way down, its fork straddling a lower branch.

"Watch again," I said aiming at the fork.  My second shot split the fork neatly, the two halves dropping to the ground.

These events happened long ago.  Today I have none of these guns, except the flintlock.  They are gone from my life,  In fact, I have no idea what  became of them.  I know I did not dispose of them, did not sell them, did not give them away, did not take them to the police.  You would think that a collection of this size, not very large for serious collectors, but rich in diversity and lore, would have some final fate.  There were some break-ins at my father's house during long stretches when he was absent, but I don't recall that the guns were among the missing items.  One break-in was aimed at the copper piping, ripped out of the ceiling in the cellar.  One saw the disappearance of a small lock box, containing my grandfather's watch, a fine, gold, pocket watch.

These memories are familiar but still alien now, so different is my world, so different am I.  Guns repel me but once I was in thrall to them.   What is it that makes guns so compelling?  Why do we love guns, why does our culture make of them a fetish?  A gun, rifle or pistol, has only three uses: (1) shooting targets, (2) shooting game, (3) shooting people.  Above all it is a lethal weapon, invented and perfected to send a bullet tearing through tissue, destroying organs, smashing bones, stopping hearts, ripping brains.  It's lethal power is intoxicating.  We are empowered by them and we use them to secure our identity, to tell others and ourselves who we are.  Guns affect our psyches in ways that allow me to write about "the thrill of firing my weapon with lethal intent."  And why should that be thrilling, if not as a demonstration of naked power.

"I've always thought of guns as tools," I heard recently from a highly intellectual professional with Western roots.  This, I imagine, is supposed to dilute the harsh truth with ideas like tools can be used for good or for bad. Of course a gun is a tool but so is a hand grenade.  Or a flame thrower. But you wouldn't use a hand grenade to uproot a tree stump and you wouldn't use a flame thrower to defoliate the weeds on your lawn.  A gun is a tool to meet deadly force with deadly force.  That's what Rodney Peaires believed he was doing when Yoshi Hattori, a visiting Japanese student came up his Baton Rouge, Louisiana, driveway on Halloween 1992.  Hattori first rang the Peairs doorbell, causing Mrs. Peairs to cry out "Rodney, get your gun."  Peairs fetched his Magnum 44 and went out through  the garage.  Meanwhile, Hattori, getting no response at the front door, went around to the side. When Hattori failed to heed Peairs' command "Freeze", he shot the 16 year old boy in the chest.

Many Americans feel the same way Peairs felt, that their homes are fortresses besieged by menacing, deadly threats, and so they prepare themselves to meet the moment of mortal peril with tools designed to thwart deadly force. A Louisiana jury sympathized with Peairs and acquitted him.

Fortunately for me, and for Uncle Joe, I had a little more time to apply my reality check to the apparent menace.  My reality principle was more formative and less reliable than Mr. Peairs', but I had time to think about using the shooter I was carrying.  Uncle Joe never knew what peril he was in. Yoshi Hattori never knew what hit him.

Charles Sawyer taught computer programming at Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1990 to 2017. He retired from Google in 2015. His biography of B.B. King, The Arrival of B.B. King, was published by Doubleday in 1980 and Da Capo in 1982. The book was translated to German in 1995, appearing as B.B. King Koenig Des Blues by Hannibal Verlag. It was translated into Japanese in 2015 and packaged with a 17-CD boxed set by P-Vine in Tokyo, Japan. He is author and photographer of  B.B. King: From Indianola to Icon. A Personal Odyssey With the King of the Blues, published in 2022 by Schiffer Publishing.  Website  charliesawyer.pubsitepro.com/product/bb-king-from-indianola-to-icon .  He is the founder and leader of the blues band, 2120 South Michigan Avenue.  For a personal profile of him visit https://magazine.unh.edu/issue/spring-summer-2021/several-lives/