cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Building My Wife's Deer Rifle A while ago I gave Trish my Enfield. The Enfield was the basic British infantry weapon during WW2 and this particular one dates from 1943. At the time she was sort of 'whatever' but later she decided it was kind of cool and she has been shooting it some. I think it's mostly the fact that her English friends get all a-titter at the idea of her with this rifle, given that England is a neutered country where most firearms are banned for private ownership. They ooh and ahh over the pictures of her shooting. She is also more interested in shooting now that deer season is over and we don't have nearly enough venison in the fridge. This annoys her as much as it does me. In order to put away more meat next season she is going to start hunting as well, which doubles our bag limit. One person can shoot up to 6 deer on a basic license without buying extra tags. If she hunts as well then we can get a total of 12 for the household. [By the way, we had cow steak last night for dinner for the first time since last summer. Ugh. I mean, it was ok I guess but it's fucking full of fat. You have to spit out ever other bite. And if you've been away from it for a while, beef has rather a strong taste. Venison tastes 'normal' to us now and beef is weird. Also the beef you buy in stores isn't aged at all, meaning it's relatively tough and lacks depth of flavor. Our venison is all dry-aged and it 10 times better than the shitty meat at the grocery store. But I digress).] So anyway, she's all into shooting now because she has to get good by autumn of 2008 in order to get us some deer. Meaning that she needs a proper deer rifle. One that fits her properly, since she is something like 5' 4" and I am just shy of 5' 9". My rifles mostly have longer stocks for my longer arms that won't fir her well. At first we were talking about buying her something new. Probably a Remington youth model for $500 or so. Then she was holding that Enfield and pointed out that the stock was a bit shorter than most of our other rifles and seems to fit her quite well. Hmmm. Ok then. So she goes and shoots the fuck out of a pumpkin with it a few weeks ago and decides that she likes the balance as well. As for ballistics, the .303 cartridge is somewhere between a 30-30 and a 30-'06. Certainly adequate for deer inside of 200 yards. The final piece of the puzzle came when I saw in the Cabelas catalog last night that they now have scope mounts for the Enfield that do not require and gunsmithing. This is important because I refuse to go drilling holes in a nice old piece of history like that. Maybe if I had a bunch of Enfields I would make the sacrifice but we only have the one here. The nice thing about Enfields is that the bolt handles are already bent and you can just mount a scope right on there without having to replace or alter the bolt handle in order to keep it from smacking into the scope. Today during lunch I ordered a couple of boxes of military surplus ammo for her to practice shooting with as well as that scope mount. We have a spare scope and rings lying around that I could mount on the Enfield right away. Then we can see what this rifle is really capable of. If we can put 5 rounds into a 3 inch circle at 100 yards then I think we're in business here and we have Trish's new deer rifle all ready to go. 1:20 pm - January 18, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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