By David E. Petzal

Back in the late 1970s I began rooting around in the last earthly remains of critters I had done in to recover the spent bullets that did them in. I then put the slugs in little paper change envelopes that I got from the bank, and recorded all the data—range, scope setting, bullet weight, how the animal reacted—on the envelope.

Recently, I went through my bullet collection and am currently meditating on the following:

On my first trip to Africa, I took a 7mm Weatherby Magnum loaded with the old 160-grain screw machine Nosler Partition bullets. I recovered four of them, and each weighed precisely 111.6 grains. Not 111.5, or 111.7, but 111.6. What are the odds on that?

From the 1970s to about 2000, I recovered lots of bullets. After that, the numbers fell off drastically. In recent years, the only time I find a bullet is if I shoot something really sizeable, like an elk, or bigger. Of the bullets I’ve used most in recent years—Swift A-Frame and Scirocco, Hornady GTX, Barnes all-copper bullets in their various forms—the only one I’ve found in an animal was a .416 Swift 400-grain A-Frame that ended up under the hide of a Cape buffalo on the far side.

By David E. Petzal

This past week I shot Sporting Clays with a friend of mine named Charlie Yellott, who is not only a hell of a shotgunner, but a fine gunsmith as well. Charlie was shooting a Remington Model 32 o/u which had been built in 1934. He had rust-blued it and stocked it in an iridescent piece of black walnut. It was a reminder that wood can’t compete with chemicals for a working-rifle stock, but on a shotgun, wood is the only thing to have. (Unless, of course, you want to do something like hunt waterfowl or turkeys, and then who cares?)

A figured wood stock is like a snowflake; it is unique; there has never been one exactly like it and there never will be another one like it. Moreover, it will change over the course of time. Walnut usually darkens as it ages, and its colors get richer. One of the great satisfactions in working with walnut is sanding a blank as smooth as glass and then applying the finish. It is at that point that the thing is literally transformed. All the shades and tones jump to life in an instant.

By David E. Petzal

One of the things for which I have been taken to task is a statement I made in, I think, a Nosler reloading manual to the effect that the .222 is a 200-yard gun, and if you want to shoot farther, you need something more powerful like a .22/250.

This is, of course, arrant nonsense, and when I’m done writing this post I will go and kill myself by way of apology. But that notwithstanding, I think the reason I made that statement was as follows: The things you learn early on retain their force, despite change, and despite massive evidence that they are no longer true.

By David E. Petzal

As a rule, I try to avoid philosophy as strenuously as I avoid honest work. I would as soon read Hegel or Kant or Nietzsche as I would pound a darning needle up my nose. But sometimes one is forced to think about something more all encompassing than Ms. Mila Kunis (pictured here).

While hunting in New Zealand this past spring, I ran into a South African hunter of vast experience who said, in the course of our conversation, “The purpose of hunting isn’t to kill some stupid animal. It’s to give yourself a chance to stand alone in the wilderness and realize how insignificant you are.”