By David E. Petzal

One of the cultural phenomena I observe in deer camps is the cornucopia* of sweets that seem to lie on every table that is not already cluttered by used socks, ammo boxes, or 25-year-old copies of Playboy. Grown men who would not dream of doing so under normal conditions gobble stuff that is guaranteed to give you diabetes before it even clears your descending colon.

In the camp that I most recently decorated with my presence, there was not only candy of all sorts, but boxes of Twinkies for the lowbrows and for the highbrows like myself, terrific coffee cake that would give you diabetes before it got past your duodenum. Of course I indulged. I’ve had to fight my weight since I was 11 years old, and for the rest of the year I stay away from the sugar, but in deer camp it’s different.

By David E. Petzal

So, there I was, sitting in a box blind in Maine 10 minutes before last shooting light, looking through my scope at a hillside with a whitetail on it, trying to decide whether the creature had horns or not. This was complicated by the fact that the whitetail was already in deep shadow, and that the hillside was backlighted by the setting sun, and by the fact that it (the deer, not the sun) had its buttocks toward me and its head down in an infernal tangle of branches, weeds, and other annoying plant life.

I was looking at the critter through a Zeiss Conquest rifle scope and, good as the scope is, I was unable to tell if it was time to pull the trigger. Finally, since the light was running out, I said the hell with it and picked up a Zeiss 10x42 Conquest HD binocular (a loaner; sent it back yesterday) and saw at a glance what I could not see through the scope—that the beast was a doe and that the day was over.

By David E. Petzal

Thanks to Deadeye Dick for this idea, but before we get to scopes, here are two more handloading tips that I want to get down before I forget them.

Before I resize my cases, I clean the carbon off the necks with a metal polish called Simichrome. Then I wipe off the black ugh and throw them in the case tumbler with the fired primers still in place. This saves you having to poke pieces of ground-up corncob out of the flasholes.

If you want to do a really thorough job of degreasing, soak the re-sized shells in acetone for 15 minutes. You do this outdoors, or in the garage with the doors open. They dry off very quickly, and if you want to speed up the process even more, turn a fan on them.

OK, scopes. Because long-range shooting is now all the rage, some scope designers have made their reticles things of unholy complexity, packed with dots, lines, very small lines, squiggles and, in some cases, runes. This is due to the belief that a) the more complex it is, the better it is, and b) the people who design hunting optics have apparently done precious little hunting and intend to sell these things to people who are likewise unqualified.

By David E. Petzal

For the past few weeks, Phil Bourjaily and I have been doing a series of talk-radio interviews extolling the virtues of "The Total Gun Manual," which is rapidly being recognized as not only the greatest firearms book ever published, but possibly the greatest book ever published, period—greater even than "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,"  "Leatherstocking Tales," or "Tess of the d’Urbervilles." 

Recently I did a crude and boorish interview, the kind I enjoy, but in the course of it I was asked how many guns I own. I was asked this because the talk-show guys were not shooters, and this is not a question one shooter asks another, at least in the circles in which I travel. You would sooner ask how much money someone makes, or if their livestock is afraid of them at night, or if everything below the belt is working OK.

But I digress.