Bob Meinecke

I guess I must have chuckled as I looked down at what once was a revolver lying on the dealer’s table with the “Make an offer” sign beside it. Built about 1880, it was, let’s just say, “well used.” It was an off-brand top break 32 caliber, popular back in the day. The nickel was flaking off from the six inch barrel and from both the cylinder and frame. Bare metal and rust were very apparent. The bore was totally choked with dirt and rust and the ejector star worked only partially. But that was okay because the firing pin was gone and, even had the firing pin been present, the revolver would not cock to fire since those springs were either broken or missing. And the grips were broken. Oh yeh, the barrel sported a definite ring in the bore, about two thirds of the way to the muzzle, also.

Years ago, probably back in the Pleistocene era, but perhaps earlier when being a successful hunter made the difference between feeding your family or going hungry, backwoods skills in the field were an important necessity. In fact, people with those skill sets were venerated by tribal members as it was that important. On a personal note, for our family that wasn’t that long ago, perhaps only as much as 35 or 40 years back. Money was scarce, guns and bullets were expensive, and time off to go hunting was a rare commodity.

A couple of weekends ago, when the Sheridan little guys football team traveled to Cody to play both Powell and Cody, Sandi and I had the rare opportunity to watch our youngest grandson, Walker, do his football thing. Older brother Kyle is also a footballer and plays college football for the North Dakota Blue Hawks, if memory serves, as a wide receiver among other positions. Oldest grandson Cory holds a championship belt in his weight class as a pugilist (boxing for you illiterates), and the girls are into soccer and softball and girly things besides all the rough and tumble sports.

Most everyone, it seems, has their favorite influences or mentors in their chosen line of work. Those of us who write have the good fortune to have hundreds of contributors to choose from. Some fantastic, some very good, some not so good and then there’s the mundane. Usually found holding forth on the internet or so I’m told.

Reaching back a couple of decades ago into cinematic history, there was a cute Disney movie (the cute type of film Disney used to produce that originally made them their

If I hadn’t been intently paying attention to the vagaries (we call them potholes) in the old road, and was actually anticipating and expecting what nearly occurred, I’d have whacked that big whitetail doe that cut across the road in front of us and probably dropkicked her into oblivion into some Mormon farmer’s pasture. Yeh, this was down by Burlington, last Saturday, when the mild weather was returning and getting out of the house seemed like a good idea.

For hunters, there are, it seems, two fundamental rules of caliber selection for the hunt. I personally spent much, if not most, of my early years trying unsuccessfully to invalidate

Biologists call it “Hyperflagia” or some such word. It’s not only a strange word, it’s a word I haven’t found in any of my three dictionaries. Maybe it’s a made-up

The originally aboriginal saying of, “ I heard the owl call my name,” was one of deep belief at one time, intimating that if the owl called your name, your

There was a “horror” movie on the tube some years back, probably a “B” grade production, (possibly it was a C or even D), that I caught simply because of my insomnia. I was up late with nothing to do, like many nights, and, truthfully speaking, I was too tired to do it. So I was surfing the telly when I came across a blurb for what I thought was a nature program on giant crocodiles, and decided to add to my base core of knowledge on dangerous reptiles. As the song says, “That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”