Lucky Shot

One of my favorite movies is A Christmas Story, which is based on a novel written by Jean Shepherd. For about the past 30 years I have not let a single December go by without watching it several times. I absolutely love that movie for a number of reasons but mainly because it does such a wonderful job of depicting how innocent life was when I was growing up in rural America. Just like Ralphie, I received my first Daisy Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas and just like Ralphie's mom, mine often cautioned me--"don't shoot your eye out with that thing." The blue-steel beauty was my very first firearm and I was awfully proud of it. A scene burned into its stock (with a branding iron for sure) had Red Ryder and his sidekick Little Beaver riding hell-bent for leather, no doubt in pursuit of bad guys who wore black hats and spent a lot of time tying innocent maidens to railroad tracks.

I grew up in the country and back behind our house apiece was a three-story barn, built by my father. Like most barns in those days, it attracted huge field rats and I considered it my job to keep their population in check. In looking back, I am sure other methods would have been more effective but I chose to do it in a way that made it lots of fun. I'd wait until dark, hunker down between bales of hay and play a waiting game. After awhile the rats would forget about my presence and when I could hear them scurrying around I would switch on my Little Beaver, two-cell flashlight (which was taped to the forearm of my Daisy) and start blasting.

I'll never forget switching on my light on an especially dark night and seeing two eyes peeping at me the over the edge of the horse trough. Considering the size of the eyes and the distance between them, it had to be the rat of all rats, one so big it would have made Willard look like a titmouse. So I squeezed off a round only to discover that I had drilled a skunk right between the eyes. The range was short and BB guns were quite powerful in those days and the critter died so quickly it did not have time to spray. Imagine my surprise when I discovered two babies so small they calmly allowed me to handle them. A friend of the family who was a veterinarian removed their scent glands and I became the only kid in my neck of the woods with pet skunks. At night they slept beneath my bed and were easily housebroken to a litter box just like a domestic cat.

I had several boyhood chums and among them only Gerald Holden shared my love for shooting and being in the woods. I liked the kid a lot but I always considered him a bit strange; as I saw it, someone who was of the opinion that Gene Autry could possibly outride, outshoot, outsing and outcowboy my hero Roy Rogers had to be a bit nuts.