By David E. Petzal

I spent this past week in an elevated stand in Maine, looking for deer that are no longer there, and in the process, hit upon a way to make the money all of you think I have. I was part of a group of 12 or so geezers who get together the third week in November every year and dodder around with rifles. Some of us have been attending these soirees for almost 20 years, and it is a pleasure to be around people who know the lyrics to “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?”

By Philip Bourjaily

This is Rick Frees, of Riverside, Iowa (self-proclaimed future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk) hunting pheasants with his sons Brian (l) and Drew (r) and their springer spaniel, Clem. The occasion is Rick’s annual celebration of his late father’s birthday, which he marks by getting his dad’s old Winchester 1400 out of the cabinet and taking it pheasant hunting.

By Philip Bourjaily

The pellets you see here make up the content of a pre-production sample of Federal’s new Prairie Storm pheasant loads,  a lead version of their Black Cloud.  The normal looking shot is copper-plated 4s. They are mixed with “Flitestoppers,” which are also 4s but have rings around them that look like Saturn, or like WWI helmets. The white stuff is buffer, which helps the pellets keep their shape as they go down the barrel.

Both pellets and the buffer are loaded into ...

By Philip Bourjaily

The machine pictured above is one more interesting things I saw at the Beretta factory: the shotgun break-in machine.

Every A400 Xplor action gets a turn on the machine. Two barreled receivers go in the rests at a time and metal arms clamp onto the bolt handles (the break-in machine operator is about to put a second barreled action in the machine. You can see the arm that will fit over the bolt). The other end of the arm is attached to a wheel which spins very fast, working the arm back and forth, slamming the actions open and shut. It loolks like an old-fashioned steam locomotive  when it gets going.

In two minutes on the machine the action cycles 500 times --  the equivalent of running twenty boxes of heavy ammunition through the gun.

A lot of people recommend ...