Sporting Notes

bob hayley
Bob Hayley in his workshop, in 2008, with some of his old loading tools and a few (!) of his vast collection of loading dies. I never asked him a question about old guns that he could not answer.

Not an Obituary

Readers of Gray’s over the past dozen years will be familiar with the name Bob…
wingshooting
Jeff Ogle giving Mike (left) and Burt the obligatory safety lecture before we start.

Wingshooting 101

’Tis a sad fact, but these days very few of us grow up with fathers…
shotgun

Gentlemen, Meet Lucile…

Lucile first crossed my path in 2018. One could wax metaphoric and pretend Lucile was…
ftw ranch shooting

Courting Danger

by Terry Wieland The FTW Ranch, in the Texas hill country west of Kerrville, is…
Terry Wieland
Wieland on a mountaintop, trying out a Springfield Arms Waypoint 2020. He is not over-dressed.

Not Quite a Blue Norther, But …

by Terry Wieland In his novel, The Searchers, Texas native Alan Le May describes what…
GERBER MAGNUM HUNTER
Gerber Magnum Hunter — one of the great folding knives from the 1980s.

The Kindness of Strangers

Back in 1985, I went into my favorite gunshop in downtown Toronto — there were…

FOLK ART — OR NOT

Fifteen years ago, I was offered the chance to buy an ancient Winchester 1886 for…
whitetail

WHITETAIL U.

Sitting in a deer stand, when there are no deer in sight, haven’t been for…
ammunition

Shooting in a Time of Shortages

In the past few years, ammunition prices plummeted as more foreign companies began tapping the…
The old Lee-Enfield No. 5 Mk. I, a.k.a., “Jungle Carbine,” was a decent “scout rifle” exactly as it was issued to British troops in Burma and Malaya in 1945. Other good factory scout rifles include the Savage 99 and the Mannlicher-Schönauer Model 1903.

Scout Rifles

THE ARMY SCOUT IS AN ALMOST MYTHICAL CHARACTER FROM FRONTIER HISTORY—as admired in his day…

Let it Slide

Why the American pump gun keeps going and going and going and going.

Black Forest Baroque

THE CASTLE IN THE GERMAN TOWN OF LAUBACH dates from about a.d. 1250. It’s still…