Dirty Pierre, an original French trade gun, belongs in a museum....but got carried hard in the field. How many people do you know got a double on rooster pheasants with a single shot original black powder trade gun???
You gotta hear this one! Jerry and his young wife, Laurie, were over in the eastern part of the state for a pheasant hunt. Everyone is carrying pump shotguns and semi-autos. They were hunting in large parties, everyone abreast 25 yds apart marching down cornfield after cornfield. Nobody had a bird yet. Everyone was looking at Jerry and his "stupid" antique gun with an eye fulla stink. He'd had enough of these military maneuvers and decided they'd bug out. So he and Laurie went to a small piece of public land to try puddlejumping ducks. As they were walking up on a puddle he sees something odd popping up out of the tal grass and falling back down. It repeats over and over. When they were close enough, it was revealed...two rooster pheasants scrapping with each other. And they were like clockwork, popping up every few seconds. He just gets in the rhythm of this and when they popped up, he popped a cap (literally, this is a caplock gun!) on them! DOUBLES! Later they came back with the two roosters and a couple of ducks he'd shot. No one else in the modern brigade had yet to hit anything!
As for Ambergris, she's a beautiful flintlock .54 cal rifle he built with a moosehunt in mind. He inlaid a gorgeous silver moosehead silhouette in the stock for "medicine", and later added several silver sperm whales in the forend. I have a collection of photos of that gun resting against large whitetail deer. It's a proven meat-maker. Always in fairest possible chase, no camoflauge, no cover sent, no bait, no elevated shooting platform, just a man and a gun sitting against a tree or a rockpile. "The secret is to spend most of your life sitting on all the wrong places to hunt deer until you have weeded them out. After that you will always kill your buck, " Jerry says.
