I’ve never fully written down the experience of acquiring the rifle from O.T. I probably should have while it was still fresh. The details fade over time. What I can say now is that the trip was easily the most poignant experience I’ve had in 40-some years of hunting. I’d known O.T. for over a decade. We’d grown to be friends over my regular visits to get my mowers, etc., worked on. We had a deal where I’d leave off my chainsaw blades to be sharpened and then come back in a week and sit and talk with him. Finally, it became regular visits to see him with no other excuse except to sit on the porch and talk to him.
He was well known in those parts. He’d run the mower shop for over 20 years and never let it get in the way of his hunting. O.T.’s first love was grouse. Turkey and deer were a distant second. The grouse had all but gone. My first entree into O.T.’s good graces was giving him permission to hunt grouse with his dog on my property. It had been a regular thing for him before I bought the place. I don’t know if he ever managed to bag one, but he was always excited when I would report a grouse sighting at my place. He knew the place better than I did.
He had this 25-06 that everyone treated with great respect. You’d meet somebody, and the subject of O.T. would come up, and the first thing somebody would ask was “Have you seen his rifle?” Actually, I never saw it before I bought it. However, O.T. would regularly inject a story about deer in our conversations. Usually, it was about seeing some big buck at last light and dropping it dead in its tracks. The stories came from a time when the deer herds were still fairly small, so everyone knew when a deer was killed in this neighborhood. O.T. was a bit of a legend. He’d gotten the rifle custom-built about 1982 and put an early Aimpoint red dot on it.
In 2013, I visited O.T. during a trip down in the summer. O.T. was getting frail. His lungs had been bothering him. However, when I got up on the porch he gave me bad news. He’d been watching a baseball game on TV and his good right eye had just stopped working. The doc had blamed it on a blood clot or something, but it was dead and it wasn’t coming back. His left eye had been kind of wonky for years. He could barely see to get around. He was going to have to give up the Mower Shop as well as any future plans of hunting. He’d already sold off his hunting dog. He mentioned selling out and going to live in an apartment in town. He’d sell everything at auction and give it to his daughter to defray costs for care for him and his wife.
I offered to buy his deer rifle. At first, he wasn’t too keen on the idea, but I promised to give him whatever he asked. I probably paid too much for it, but that was the idea. He’d always cut me a good deal on all the work I had done. I was hoping to pay him back. I took young Angus with me to pick up the rifle a few weeks later.
O.T. brought me down the basement. By this time, I’d been a regular visitor for 10 years and had frequently been in his living room. I’d never been to the basement. It was the epitome of what you’d expect for a guy who hunted. It was a cozy room with wood paneling and a couch and a bunch of chairs. At one time, he and his buddies had hung out there, but his buddies were all gone. The room had quite a bit of dust about. You could tell nobody went down there anymore.
O.T. had us sit on the couch while his went to the fairly large safe and started working the lock. It took him a good 20 minutes to get in. I didn’t know why, and asked if he needed help. He didn’t want any. When he finally got it opened and brought the rifle out, Angus and I realized he had been crying. Money changed hands. I thanked O.T. and we left. Angus announced he wanted a man cave just like that. I guessed he was too young to understand what we’d just witnessed. When I got it back to the house, I examined it. There were 30 years of marks on the stock from throwing it up on fenceposts and trees to get a steady shot. I treasured each one.
I brought O.T. a bunch of venison that fall. He figured it must have come from the Mauser, but it hadn’t. I had not gotten the rifle squared away to my like until the next year. I didn’t correct him though. He kind of snapped at me when I told him I’d had to pull the Aimpoint off and install a regular scope. The stock was such I couldn’t get my eye down to properly see through the sight. However, he was a head shorter than me. Something was bound to be off. I ended up also taking the recoil pad off. It was all too long for me, especially with several layers on. We never talked again about the rifle. I learned it was a painful subject.
O.T. moved out shortly thereafter and he was dead by the end of winter. The house and contents went to auction, and a new family moved in. I drive by regularly, and can’t help feeling like I should turn in and stop to see O.T. on the porch.
Shooting OT’s Rifle
Things did not go smoothly with OT’s rifle. My first loads with the rifle using H4350 were anemic. I switched to H4831 and encountered bridging in my powder measure. One load would be 50% light and another 50% heavier. I finally resorted to using a dipper and then topping off with a trickler. See Call me a Dipper for details. Initially, I went with Hornady 117-grain Interlock SPs. They produced good accuracy. However, the deer ran a bit more than I was expecting. I had other rifle projects at the time, so I put it aside after the 2014 season.
After I retired, I had a chance to get caught up. I started back in 2023 with 100 grain Hornady SP and H4831 SP. I hunted with it, but nothing showed up. In 2024, I finally got some luck this past year, filling my doe tag.
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