Ugly Duckling Of A Differernt Kind
At 81 and multiply disabled, laregely housebound, seemed my hunting days were behind me. Then my son told me about special accomodations our state’s wildlife agency provides, including handicapped accessible duck blinds.
Last time a physical problem intefered with duck season I was a lot younger. The world was a lot simpler. Washington still was a free state. The “progressive” left had not come to power with its antigun agenda. My neurosurgeon cleared a short black Remington 1100 with an AR-like pistol grip for use below a cervical collar.
The ugly gun basically saved my season. But three decades later it seemed long and heavy as a ten-gauge with a 30-inch barrel. When I acquired it, my weekly workouts included sets of 40- and 50-pound dumbells. Today my physical therapast warns against 10-pound weights. Starts me off with one-pound weights.
Friend of mine familiar with my handicaps and with firearms introduced the idea of “bullpup” shotguns, modeled on short weapons designed for quick deployment from an APC. Designed with weight of the action behind the shooting hand. Making the barrel seem much shorter.
The bullpup in action can essentially be a one-hand gun. Like my Remington. Except with the weight behind the grip, not dangling out front, my atrophied frame could actually handle it. And they’re inexpensive on top of that.
But.
But the libtard left running Washington bans purchase. And they’re still filling the bill hopper with more antigun hogwash. So no duck hunt for me at 81. Maybe no more hunts ever. Far too crippled and poor to escape to a free state. All I can do is trminisce about my ugly duckling gun that saved a season…
The big wooden drift boat glided in a smooth U-turn out of the current of the Chehalis River into a brushy slough. It was quiet as a canoe under the guide’s skilled oars. Beside me on the front seat, my hunting partner had his thumb on the hammer of his beautifully kept old ’97 Winchester. The only sound was the swish of the oars and the steady drip of Pacific Northwest rain. No quacks or chuckles up ahead, no ripples on the still water to suggest ducks.
We swept into the final turn with an expert flourish on the oars.
There was a frozen moment while a dozen or so loafing mallards on a sandbar about 20 yards away registered our intrusion.
Then the explosion, exactly like a covey rise.
When it was over, I had two fat mallard drakes down and my partner was bemoaning the tight choke of his pump gun.
The guide handed me a heavy greenhead in bright winter plumage. “That gun of yours is just about perfect for this,” he said.
Well, yes. But tell it to the anti-gun media. For that matter, tell it to gun snobs. Because my “ugly duckling” semi-automatic duck gun exactly fits the profile of a so-called assault shotgun. (They called ’em riot guns when I was a kid.)
“Steel threes,” I said. “A 2 3/4-inch gun, improved cylinder and not even magnum loads!” Yes, I was grinning. With two fat mallards to its credit that ugly little gun looked as good to me as a handbuilt English double.
My ugly duckling is a dull black Remington 1100 with a 20-inch barrel, fitted with a black synthetic Choate full pistol-grip stock, similar to that of an M-16. I removed the ten-shell magazine extension and plugged the factory magazine to legal waterfowl capacity. But it still wouldn’t have looked out of place in the muscled embrace of The Terminator before he went in for an antique lever-action Winchester shotgun.
I didn’t select the ugly-duckling gun as a stunt. My choices that year boiled down to hunting with the stubby “assault shotgun”…or not hunting at all. My left arm was virtually useless due to nerve damage from a herniated spinal disk. I shot that brace of mallards one-handed with the stock snuggled under my thick spongy cervical collar.
I almost missed that season entirely before my neurosurgeon relented. His passion was sailing and he understood passions. He agreed I could try to hunt — if I absolutely promised not to raise my left arm above shoulder level. Every time I did that, he said, the nerve trunk to my left arm rubbed over the fractured disk “like a wet frayed rope on a rusty bollard.” Even his medical advice reflected sail-boating.
Guns such as this are designed for one-handed use during locked-door entries and other grim work. The season was running down quick. My favorite gun-shop proprietor pronounced a combat-stocked shotgun the only possible choice. Because of the leverage the pistol grip gives, you can snug the stock tight to your shoulder, get your face down, and truly shoot one-handed.
As we shoved off for the next slough, I remembered the look on our young guide’s face when I uncased the 1100 in the headlights on the boat launch. Carefully inscrutable, I guess you’d call it. He seemed nervous about whether it was even legal, and if he hadn’t known me since he was sixteen with a fresh driver’s license in his pocket he might have said something. My work in the slough had changed his mind.
His gun-club-owning dad had already seen me handle the 1100 on decoying ducks over a flooded corn field on my only other hunt that year. It was very late in the season; the ducks were blind-shy. I let flock after flock work above the decoys without shooting; they seemed too far away. We sweet-talked the singles and finally one committed. I missed.
No gun I’ve ever owned seems capable of hitting the first duck of the day. With that out of the way, I took three straight. The third mallard fell ten yards away. In a four-duck year, I needed one more for a limit. When the next trio began its coy aerial ballet, Corky suggested I try for the fat drake in the center.
“About 30 yards?” I whispered.
“Maybe 35. Try him on the next swing. They’re not going to come down.”
Whether 30 or 35 yards, the 1100 knocked the drake down. Four ducks with six shots, one-handed. It was 9:30 a.m. and we were done for the day.
“That makes a limit, and me a good guide,” Corky said.
I prefer blued steel and walnut in my shotguns, not something that looks like it was made by the Mattel toy company. With great reluctance I retired and then sold my well-loved LeFever Nitro Express when steel shot became the law, never imagining that other, kinder non-toxics were on the horizon.
Next I abandoned 2 3/4-inch steel, which seemed anemic compared to my old hand-loaded lead number fives. A second-hand Browning Auto 5 magnum served until Browning produced the 10-gauge pump. A load of ten-gauge steel threes seemed to approximate my lead fives.
There was no way I could afford a used Ithaca ten-gauge double and I didn’t trust Spanish ten-gauge doubles. I had a lovely little Spanish sixteen-gauge double that tended to fire both barrels when I pulled once on doves; I had no desire to experience that sensation in ten-gauge! The big Browning pump was a duck and goose killer par excellence and I was well-pleased, not interested at all in the new 3 1/2-inch twelve, which I considered a passing fad.
Then the week before duck season that year, I sat up in bed, turned my head and felt an internal snap! Pain was instantaneous. It grew steadily worse. Within a day, my left arm refused to support anything heavier than a coffee cup. The diagnosis was a herniated disk, with a piece lodged against a main nerve pathway.
Most of the duck season was gone before I began to emerge from the mists of pain. Progress was good, with the disk expected to reabsorb naturally without tricky surgery. That was the good news. No lifting of my left arm above my shoulder for six months; that was the bad news. The big Browning pump would remain idle…
Back out on the Chehalis River, several Barrow’s goldeneyes came arrowing upstream past the drift boat. It was a difficult shot, twisting up and to the right, with the thick cervical collar wedged beneath my Sterns float coat. Ironically, the shot was possible because I wasn’t using my left arm to swing the gun.
With the gun snugged tight via the leverage of the Choate pistol grip, I swung through the bill of a drake. Goldeneyes are notoriously tough birds, but this one folded like a bobwhite centered with eights. The Barrow’s completed my four-duck limit.
I wedged the unloaded 1100 against the thwart and sat back to give my partner the stage for the rest of the float. I hadn’t been able to lift a two-pound weight with my wasted left triceps when rehabilitation began. Conventional two-handed use of a shotgun remained out of the question.
As noted, I’m not enamored of steel shot in 2 3/4-inch. But the surgeon figured the 1100’s soft recoil with short shells would be as easy on my neck as possible. My then-wife always suspected my waterfowling obsession qualified me for a special place with no sharp edges. When I showed up with an expensive black toy usually featured in drug-war movies, she was sure I had gone clear round the bend. To humor the patient, she agreed to throw some clay birds.
I smoked the first one she tossed.
“You used your left hand!” she said suspiciously.
“Did not!”
“You must have!”
“Don’t be that way,” I wheedled. “You know I seldom hit ’em with both hands. This gun is magic, that’s all.”
She grumbled about the price of this particular “magic,” but tossed more birds. I quit after a run of six straight.
“Don’t want to overstress the neck,” I explained.
“You mean you want to quit while you’re ahead.”
“That, too.”
The ugly little gun did not make me the deadliest shot in the West. But knowing the 1100’s limitations, I became much more patient. The limit in the cornfield and the limit on the river salvaged my truncated season at the eleventh hour.
In the muddy parking lot after our river trip, I quickly cased the 1100, fearing prejudice of any onlookers. Thanks to the antigun media, a man in camouflage carrying a short black gun has become a modern-day bogeyman.
My ultra-conservative hunting partner found it ironic that the ugly little gun had retaught both of us the virtues of patience, open chokes and moderate loads; virtues usually associated with fine fowling pieces.
“If you asked my grandmother, she’d say this Remington is a fine fowling piece,” I told him.
“Your grandmother was a duck hunter?”
“Nope. But she always said beauty is as beauty does.”
Homilies become homilies because of their essential truth. Using her perspective, my ugly-duckling scatter-gun is all graceful swan. It saved my hunting season.
Every time I tell the story of the 1100, at least one listener seems to know a wing-shooter with one hand or arm disabled — or gone. Not one of these disabled shooters had hit upon the Choate-grip solution to their days afield. Given the media determination to demonize a type of firearm on the one hand (excuse the phrase) and the snobbery of sporting gunners on the other hand, that may never change.
As for me, the arrival of gentler non-toxic loads like bismuth was a signal to kick myself for selling my LeFever for less than a third of what they go for now. My disk healed, I built back the atrophied triceps in my left arm, and got back into two-fisted 10-gauge duck hunting the next year — but kept he 1100. Good thing I did because as I got older and old nerve damage came back to haunt me, I needed it again from time to time.
The anti-gun crowd never goes away; they’re back in full cry again. With a nation full of newly mangled veterans of foreign wars, it troubles me that hunters with one remaining good arm may never know how much grace and pure shooting pleasure a light, short gun with a politically-incorrect pistol grip could restore to their hours afield.
The 1100 with one of my traditional double-barrel 12s with the English straight-grip stock, exquisitely checkered; and expensive bismuth shells that won’t damage the older, milder-steel barrels.
