I had missed two seasons at deer camp, and there were a couple of new faces this year. As the smoke detector still hadn’t gone off, I knew dinner wasn’t sufficiently burned yet to need my attention, so I had a few minutes to finish unpacking and to lay out my hunting clothes and gear for the next day.
     As I opened up my battered old rifle case, I could hear a barely stifled laugh from one of the new faces. I had a pretty good idea what was coming next.
     “Won’t it be kinda hard paddlin’ on the frozen lake, Tom?”
     My buddy smiled and rolled his eyes; he’d heard it before. As in years past, I decided to play dumb and give the new guy (I’ll call him “Nimrod”) enough rope to hang himself. “Huh?”
     “That’s a canoe paddle in your gun case, isn’t it?” he asked with a big grin on his face.
     Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my deer rifle won’t win any beauty contests, but to my way of thinking there’s more than one kind of beautiful. New England deer seasons aren’t particularly kind to rifles. Rain, sleet, snow, wind, sun, and temperatures from the teens into the sixties in the course of a single day aren’t uncommon, and a pretty rifle doesn’t usually stay that way very long, but I should start this story at the beginning.
     Back in the days when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I wanted something with a little more range than my .30-30. I was already loading for two .308’s, my brother’s and a friend’s, so I began to haunt the local gun shops looking for a good deal on one of my own. I didn’t mind considering a fix-‘er-upper, having the time and inclination to do my own fix-‘er-uppering, so I bought and sold several in the next few months until I found one that would shoot straight enough to interest me. I’ve always liked the convenience of a removable magazine on a hunting rifle, so when I came upon the battered, sightless old Remington 788 gathering

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