By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The night had come around a campfire shared by several buddies in west-central Okanogan County in a campground on the edge of Black Pine Lake, and when we awoke before dawn the next morning, there was a quiet I immediately recognized.
It is the quiet of a blanket of snow; only a layer of cold white powder can make that loud a silence. My doubled-up sleeping bag, comfortably atop a 4-inch foam pad in the back of my 1986 4×4 Nissan pickup suddenly felt all that much more cozy.
Next to me was a Model 57 Smith & Wesson revolver on a fully-loaded cartridge belt. It is a sixgun with which I’ve become undeniably linked over the years, with a handsome deep blue finish and 6-inch barrel. This “pistolover,” as my dad might have called it, had he lived more than a month beyond his 50th birthday, would tell about the bone-chilling cold with which we dealt that opening weekend of Washington’s deer hunting season so many years ago.
The previous evening, as my gunbelt hung from a big spike someone had nailed into a tree perhaps years before reflecting the glint of the campfire around which we stood or sat, sharing hunting and non-hunting stories, talking strategy for the next morning, someone suggested the image of that gun would have made a great advertisement for S&W.
By noon the next day, after tramping through a foot of northern Washington snow, that big iron seemed joined to me. This was the first deer hunt I’d taken it along, and it would ride with me many more times, through some adventures and a few misadventures, like the time a couple of seasons later when my single-burner camp stove had to be covered with dirt to prevent an explosion when it malfunctioned at a different camp, with many of the same guys, high in the central Cascades of Yakima County.
The next morning, we awoke again to snow and icicles. This was a deer hunt on which my then-young oldest son, Rhett, came along and it was so cold I let him bundle with me in the back of the same truck, while a herd of elk had spent the night bedded down about a hundred yards downhill. We found their still-warm beds as the light climbed from the eastern sky, but this was deer season.
I can say my son, dressed as warm as I could provide, came through like a trooper. We never told mom about how cold it was; it’s a bad idea to share that kind of information with a doting female! I was certainly proud of him as he tramped along behind me (“Son, never walk in front of dad’s rifle!”) up a couple of hundred feet through rocks and timber looking for a mule deer buck that never appeared.
My Ruger Blackhawk with a 6.5-inch barrel, went along on the hunt which found me doing a solo camp that involved a wandering band of cattle on top of Funk Mountain. The damned critters made such a racket I was tempted to take home some fresh beef instead of venison, but instead I just fired up a lantern, and the sudden light convinced them they should probably go annoy somebody else who was trying to sleep. I never told the missus about that one, either, and thankfully, that Ruger has kept its mouth shut all these years!
This was the wheelgun on my hip the morning I woke up well before daylight, ate a quick breakfast of bacon and eggs, and then hiked up about 300 feet to the top of a clearcut to a spot overlooking a really busy game trail I’d discovered the day before, on the second weekend of the season, at a camp I had occupied the previous weekend with the same son.
He had declined to come along on that adventure, and I’m forever sorry because I hadn’t been seated more than 20 minutes before a mule deer buck walked in front of my .257 Roberts about a hundred yards downhill and tumbled stone cold dead down to an old logging road landing. I had the buck field-dressed and loaded with all of my hastily-stashed camp gear within an hour, and was back home by about 10 a.m. The buck was hanging in the woodshed when my managing editor called about something and I told him I was “kinda busy; I’m skinning a buck.” Since we worked at the old Fishing & Hunting News, he got all excited and promised to get the details the next morning at the office.
But I think my son was a bit disappointed that he hadn’t chosen to come along, and so was I. My Blackhawk hasn’t let me forget it, but at least that sixgun has kept it between the two of us.
A shorter Blackhawk was along in Montana back in ’03 when I wrapped up the final day of a mule deer hunt southeast of Terry by plugging a dandy 4-point buck at about 350 yards with a test rifle, a Remington chambered in .350 Remington Magnum. That was a cold hunt as well, during which the stove malfunctioned and filled the tent with smoke so thick one of the guys moved outside to his own smaller one-man tent.
No, “cold” doesn’t quite describe the eastern Montana weather on that trip. I had frost on my moustache within minutes after going outside, but an hour later, we were dressing out that big buck, which made it all worthwhile. There was snow, but not so much. The chill was abundant, however.
Years later, it would be my 4-inch S&W Model 57 which finally put down an Eastern Washington muley, delivering a moving head shot because my rifle had been put away. Heck, we all thought that buck—a fat 3×2-pointer—was down for the count, but when it turned zombie on us, I grabbed the wheelgun to finish the event, and I can only presume the story told by the witnesses is better than my own account.
I had purchased that wheelgun never intending to use it on game. Well, that’s how things turn out sometimes.
Looking back on some of these occasions, at the time they unfolded, it never occurred to me they would become the stuff of campfire tales and holiday memories. All things considered, my wheelguns have been part of a life that a kid growing up in Tacoma, in a broken home, reading monthly editions of Outdoor Life with bylines from guys named Bauer, O’Connor, Zumbo, Jobson and Carmichel never really imagined could end up actually living similar experiences. I got to hunt with Zumbo and Carmichel. Chatted by telephone with Bauer before he passed. Didn’t know O’Connor but have known his son.
Not bad, really. And summing it up as another hunting season is beginning to unfold, I can only admit that I’ve actually had a hell of a good time, and my wheelguns shared it.
