A Rifle for My Son
Every rifle worth owning is bought twice, once by the man who carries it, and once, in his mind, by the boy he means to give it to.There was a world that ran on that promise. A boy got his first rifle across a wood counter where the clerk knew his father. He was marked with the blood of his first deer. He learned who he was in a shack in the woods, one week every November, in the company of three generations of men — the living and the dead together. And the rifle on the cabin wall, made by hands in New Haven that no longer exist, was the object that carried all of it from one generation to the next.That world is ending, and it can be counted. There were 16.7 million American hunters in 1982; there are far fewer today, and the men who remain are older every year. The counters have closed. The factory that made the most beloved American rifle is now luxury apartments. And in cabins across the country, an old man stands at the wall holding a rifle that was built to be handed down — with no one left to hand it to.A Rifle for My Son is the record of that vanished world, set down before the last men who remember it are gone: the first rifle, the rites, the deer camp, the craft that died in 1964, and the honest question the whole thing finally comes down to. Part elegy, part history, part field guide — including a practical chapter on how to pass a rifle down so that both the gun and its meaning reach the next hand.For every man with a rifle on the wall and a name in mind for it.
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