Petzal: How I Spent My Summer Vacation
The photo you see here was taken in the deep and rolling hills of old Virginia, by Mr. Jerry Cox...


The photo you see here was taken in the deep and rolling hills of old Virginia, by Mr. Jerry Cox of Tazewell, VA, to whom I am indebted. The people standing behind me are also Virginians, except for the fellow on the left, whose name I did not get, but whom I know to be a pensioner from Tennessee. The rifle in the rest in front of me belongs to him. He insisted I use it, because my gun “…would be embarrassing to take to a dump and shoot rats.”
It’s a shining example of how the groundhog, of all species, seems to have the absolute in high-tech hardware brought to bear on it. The rifle, whose name is Old Blood and Guts, is a .22/250, built on a Stolle left-hand action, a Canjar trigger (which you can’t get no more), 26-inch Jarrett barrel, and a McMillan stock. It weighs 15 pounds, which means it recoils so little you can see the fur part. The scope is a massive Nightforce variable.
Old B&G is actually a prairie dog rifle, and when I asked its owner how well it shot, he answered:
“The trick is to fire four very fast 5-shot groups [five shots per minute or so] and check the final point of impact. If it heats up and scatters shots it gets an F. But if it shoots into a half-inch and in the same place you can take it to the prairie-dog patch.”
It works pretty good on groundhogs, too, as the three in the foreground of the photo would tell you. If they could speak.