Duck Breast Poppers

Remove each side of a duck breast from the bone. Wood ducks are particularly desirable. Cut each side into two thin slices end-to-end so that the filets are wide and thin. This requires cutting the half breast (one side) on the same plane as the cutting board rather than 90 degrees to the board. Spread the filet with cream cheese and add a scattering of jalapeno pepper. Salt and pepper to taste. Roll the unit into a tight bundle, wrap it in smoked bacon, and secure the roll with toothpicks. Grill.

Flintlock Insurance

One possible problem faced by all who are interested in toying with those marvelous old firearms that are set off by flint striking a frizzen is the failure of those rigs actually going off. Try picking the vent hole before each shot. This assures that the path is clear to the main charge and also disturbs tiny flakes of main-charge powder, thus allowing the spark to catch more easily.

Bees & Yellow Jackets

One solution I have heard of to prevent bees and yellow jackets from attacking and stinging while you are outside is to poke a Bounce® Fabric Softener in a belt loop and wear it while outside. It is rumored to keep the pesky biters away. The same goes for keeping mice out of your camper trailer or storage room. Just scatter a few sheets about and the mice stay out.

Deer Troubles

Are deer eating your garden or flowers around your house? If so, try this simple and possibly successful solution. Place some of those small stick-in-the-ground solar lights around the vegetation. There is no prescribed number; just put one every 10 feet or so to form a border. While I can’t say for sure that these work, evidence is strong that they do. My aunt and uncle in the Memphis suburbs lost most of their ornamental plants to whitetail depredation. This past year they followed the solar light regimen and stopped the deer activity. One of their neighbors did as well. I planted a pea patch just outside my bedroom this year. Fearing that deer would eat them, I put out four lights. I don’t know that they worked, for I had never planted peas there before. But I have deer in the yard and I got production in the small patch. The deer let them grow to maturity and harvest.

Make Mine Old!

I have long been intrigued by the old – old rifles/cartridges, old photos, old tools, old wooden waterfowl decoys. All this could be a function of my being old as well, but the lure of old things captured me long before I became an old thing. So, simply being old as I now am can’t be the entire reason for the absolute absorption I experience when looking at or handling something old. It goes deeper. Isolating and describing what and why is basically impossible, for it is something that touches the very core of my being. Perhaps you know it as I, and if you do no attempted explanation is needed. And if you don’t, the intoxication of the old may one day grasp you in its clutches and refuse to set you free. You’ll know it if it does!

Take old rifles. There is something mesmerizing about the slick action of a 92 Winchester. That distinct click and silk-smooth glide of the lever and bolt are things of dreams. Nothing else has these. True, there are more modern designs that work without flaw, but even these go lacking in comparison to the 92.

And there is the Sharps. Whether an original or a much newer reproduction, the Sharps is one of a kind. Built primarily for the buffalo hunter, the Sharps was and is a unit with clear purpose. That purpose was and is to cast a heavy piece of lead to great distances. Although the trajectory is similar to a rainbow, the projectile arrives with prodigious authority. And that projectile, to be done as it was initially conceived and intended, should be pushed by black powder. That, too, is old. The Sharps is as reliable today as it was in 1874. It will take game with ease and will give a most satisfying clank on a distant steel target.

Muzzleloaders, those earliest of firearms, have experienced a rebirth in the last two decades or so. The market is literally full of rifles dubbed muzzleloaders, but most of these miss the essence of what a muzzleloader really is. The modern rigs meet the minimum requirement to be called muzzleloaders because they are loaded from the muzzle. Past that however, they are all new. But muzzleloaders are not new; they are old, at least in their original persuasion they are old. Making them with synthetic stocks and carbon or steel or aluminum ramrods and stoking them with a modern powder pellet and jacketed bullet launched by the spark from a shotgun primer just may take them out of the realm of true muzzleloaders.

An aside here: My home state of Mississippi has long done an admirable job with game management and seeing to it that hunters were afforded all reasonable opportunities to enjoy and use the bounty supplied by the woods and waters here. Some of the earliest muzzleloader-only seasons in the U.S. were opened in Mississippi, these dating back to the late 1960s. That is commendable. In the last few years some landmark changes came about. Today, primitive weapons season (though the choice of the word weapons is, in my opinion, ill used) allows use of more modern contrivances.

The initial intent was to permit rifles/cartridges predating 1900 to be used during the primitive weapons season, thus encouraging hunters who didn’t toy with true muzzleloaders to take to the fields in pursuit of an incredible whitetail population. Again, commendable. But the entire thing quickly stepped outside those intended boundaries, much to the chagrin of many who sat and watched the transformation take shape. It is now legal to use, scoped if you wish, any single-shot rifle with exposed hammer chambered to .35-caliber or larger cartridges. That opens the door for such modern rounds as the .44 Remington magnum and .444 Marlin (1964) – hardly pre-1900 units. And that misguided cartridge factor of the new rules also allows the use of the old and somewhat anemic .38-40, while at the same time discounting the excellent and time-tested .30-40 Krag (1892) and .30-30 Winchester (1895). Not the wisest of decisions it seems.

Let me be quick to say that I support those of different persuasions, and I certainly support encouraging others to become active hunters. As a result of that support, I don’t find fault with those using equipment other that what I prefer. But I do hold firm that old is old. Some of what is seen today simply is not old – in function at least. And primitive is primitive. What date in antiquity makes something primitive is, I suppose, up to the individual interpretation of the word. Life without a cell phone is primitive to my nieces and nephew! But as I have said, I’m old. That puts primitive farther back than 1970.

But enough of this rant. Still, I will continue to shoot my Sharps and 92 lever rig and pour black powder and push patched round balls down the bore of my flintlocks. So until at some point in the future when something else rambles around in my muddled brain, I’ll close this discourse. But in the meantime, make mine old!

Tony Kinton is a native Mississippian, where he grew up on a small farm. Hunting and fishing were regular parts of his life, and these pursuits produced much of the food found on his family’s table. Read more here…