Buckshooter
05-19-2008, 08:09 PM
Living in the hills of New Hampshire can have it’s ups and downs. One of the ups was that neighbors were pretty far apart up on the mountain road where the wife and I lived. There are days when you don’t have time to turn sideways and there are other days when the weather can keep you inside and your mind begins to wander into areas that should have “Keep Out” signs posted all around. Being a typical male I was always open to some type of adventure as long as it didn’t involve the local sheriff or the people who populated the junkyard on the other side of the mountain. One rainy day I got the sudden urge to shoot my muzzle loader . The wife wasn't home, so this was an opportune time to get in some range time from the comfort of the dining room. I put on some Johnny Cash records and proceeded to make a shooting bench on the kitchen table using the wife’s dish towels. The cat was nervously pacing the floor and giving me the evil eye every now and then. I got out my black powder, bullets and percussion caps. I poured the powder down the barrel and was getting ready to put a bullet into the muzzle of the barrel and ram the bullet home when the phone rang. I set the muzzle loader down on the table and went to answer the phone. I picked up the phone and said “hello.” I was greeted by a female calling about wanting to save the beavers in our area. I told the lady I really didn’t care about her beavers and hung up the phone . “Now where was I” I thought to myself. Oh, yeah; Put some powder down the barrel and load the bullet, put on the percussion cap and voila! I put the powder in, loaded the bullet, rammed it home with the ramrod and pulled the hammer back. The cat was peering at me from behind the wood stove. Its’ ears were laid back and it’s eyes were narrow slits. It kind of gave me the creeps because it looked like a miniature panther ready to pounce on some poor unsuspecting creature that might be walking on its’ way to a waterhole. I went over to the window and threw it open. I didn’t actually throw it open as the windows in our old farm house had the weights tied to them that kept them open when you “threw them open.” A nice modern New England convenience from the nineteenth century. If you “threw them open” too hard they stayed open and you couldn’t get them down. The rain was coming down pretty good and I was glad to be inside where it was warm and dry. I looked out to the field and saw I still had some targets standing up, left over from an earlier time of honing my marksman skills. I maneuvered around the table and set my rifle across the towels and got where I could see the targets pretty good from the window. I pushed the curtain back some so I wouldn’t shoot a hole through them. Didn’t need the wife hollering about that. Besides that she would never know anything about this indoor shooting range as she was shopping and that was an all day affair for her even if she had a short list. I put the percussion cap onto the nipple of the rifle. I got good and comfy and was getting my sights onto the target. Johnny was singing “Ring of Fire”. I was humming along with him and mentally noted that I would pull the trigger as soon as he broke into the chorus. I set the hair trigger and slowly touched the side of the trigger. The chorus was coming up and I got my finger into position to pull the trigger. Here goes. Johnny started wailing, “I fell into a burning ring of fire.” I touched the trigger off just as he said the word fire. Just as Johnny was singing the word fire and I was touching off the trigger a sudden gust of wind blew through the window and the curtains fell back into place. I was past the point of no return with the hair trigger. The rifle roared to life and literally shook the house. I had accidentally double charged the rifle with powder when the beaver woman called and derailed my sensitive train of thought. I saw a huge fireball and the room filled with dense smoke from the burning black powder. The blast, the fire from the burning black powder and the smoke literally scared the crap out of the cat which was now exiting from its’ lair behind the wood stove like a dragster leaving the starting line at the green light. The rifle had thrown me back from the brunt of being double charged. I could hear Johnny singing, “I went down and the flames went higher.“ “Oh no! The stinking curtains were ablaze from the muzzle blast. I tried to get back up and when I did the cat jumped on my back and tried to climb through the flaming curtains to get out the window. The cat was balled up in the curtains trying to scratch its’ way clear and making weird noises I tore the curtains down with the cat inside and threw the whole kittenkaboodle outside in the rain. The cat somehow got out of the smoldering curtains and I waited til the rain let up and quickly hid them behind the barn. I lit up some foul smelling incense to cover the smell of the gunpowder and the flaming curtains. About that time the wife drives up from her shopping adventure. She comes into the house and asks what the rotten smell is and I blame it on the incense. She then spotted cat crap on the wall and the curtains missing and demanded an answer. I told her the cat must have distemper and crapped all over the floor and the wall and got tangled in the curtains. She got over it and told me to shoot the cat when I saw it again as it may be rabid or have distemper. The cat never came back home. The wife did ask why I had ear plugs in as I forgot to take them out. I told her the cat screams were eerie and I couldn't stand listening to it "suffer." Glad I never got a second shot off.