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| Above, my 1962 vintage Winchester 94. Photo by Armand Vaquer. |
It begins with:
I don’t have a favorite deer rifle, but I used to. It was a Model 94 Winchester that I got in a trade when I was 14. All the cowboys in the movies had lever-action Winchesters, so that was reason enough to want one. I can’t remember all the details of the deal, but the kid I swapped with drove a hard bargain. Among other valuable items he skinned me out of were a pocket watch that didn’t work and a model airplane engine that wouldn’t run.
The rifle was in pretty sad shape. It came with three cartridges, one of which I fired to make sure the gun would shoot. Actually, the rifle’s rusty metal and battered wood were among the reasons I wanted it. Even at that tender age I was a budding do-it-yourselfer and had visions of renewing the rifle to gleaming steel and glistening hand-rubbed wood.
What I mostly learned from that enterprise was that lever rifles are a lot trickier to reassemble than they are to take apart. When I finally got it back together it didn’t look much better than before and was certainly not what I had envisioned. But l had a deer rifle and it was my favorite, even though I never shot a deer with it.
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