Small Game Hunting Ebook

FOREWORD
This ebook deals with small game hunting, a sport which makes a direct contribution to big game hunting skills. The relationship between big and small game hunting is seldom stressed, and when it is stressed, it is seldom that tech-niques are examined in detail to show how small game hunting improves big game hunting skills. One cannot be a mediocre squirrel hunter, and at the same time a skillful deer hunter. The two techniques go together.

Of course, small game hunting is an end within itself. There is no more satisfying hunting than taking squirrel in the autumn hardwoods, cottontail rabbit when the first frost touches the upland pastures with its magic, ruffed grouse in heavy cover and raccoon along the river bottoms and swamps. Truly, one could spend a lifetime in the small game coverts, finding the game always worthy of the best hunting skills. They are our best teachers of woodcraft, rifles and shotgun field techniques.

Rifles, handguns and shotguns considered in this ebook are those which I have found well qualified for small game hunting by personal use. I have followed common hunter word usage in calling all auto-loading firearms "automatics."

I am going small game hunting-you come, too!

FRANCIS E. SELL Riverton, Oregon,

CHAPTER 1
PLINKING WITH A PURPOSE
When Art Richardson dropped us at the starting point of our hunt near Myrtle Creek, Oregon, there were six miles of mountain, meadows, sage brush and forest between us and camp.

Art looked up across the mountains where a ravel of morning mist still toyed with a peak. "You know," he said, "before we hit camp we are going to get mountain goat shooting, some brush shooting like we have on deer each autumn, open mule deer shooting, and some long range elk shooting."

Sounded like a big order that early June morning, especially with big game season so far in the future, and no mountain goat shooting within hundreds of miles of our hunting territory. Our game this day was actually ground squirrel and jack rabbit. But the day's hunting delivered just such shooting, even though the early spring nip to the air still held the ground squirrel close to their burrows, except on the sunny south slopes where the first tender shoots of grass and elk clover pushed up through the lean shale hillsides.

Art Richardson is a gunsmith and an expert hunter. He makes beautiful myrtle-wood rifle stocks. He hunts deer and elk in season. During off-season periods he hunts jack rabbit and ground squirrel. In his personal huntings arms rack there are at least ten super dupers-.257 Roberts, .270 Winchester, .30/06-sleekly stocked with myrtle, beautifully scope sighted. This morning, however, he pulled a rifle from its scabbard for squirrel hunting which rocked me back on my heels, a .38/40 lever action Winchester.

I uncased a Mossberg .22 with a scope sight. In my hunting jacket, along with a sandwich and binoculars, there were two hundred rounds of ammunition for it. No ultra high velocity rifles here!
But wait a minute! Did you ever come to grips with the problem of trajectory and bullet drop? Try playing with one of those old black powder rifles, or a .22 rimfire. They certainly bring the problem of long range hitting into focus as nothing else will.

Art had this in mind when he selected this beautiful old Winchester lever action for our first small game trip of the season, though I had expected him to show with a .25/20 or a .25/35 when he told me the evening before that he was taking a rifle with plenty of bullet drop. I know I had big game hunting in mind when I selected a Mossberg .22.

Sometime hunters are prone to forget the basic things of hunting. It is good to go afield occasionally with a rifle shooting a bullet with a rainbow curve, just to sharpen hunting and shooting wits against the day when one is abroad with some-thing more powerful, big game the quarry.

We eased along the logging road leading toward the divide, our hunting jackets zipped up against the early morning chill. Momentarily, as I looked up those long slopes and rock escarp-ments, I confess I thought longingly of my .222 Marlin which would reach out and nip a ground squirrel at two hundred yards, for these squirrel are a first cousin to woodchuck in habit, with the added virtue of seeming more canny and shy. They require a degree of stalking skill equal with that of still hunting deer on the autumn hardwood ridges.