Grandpa Moore Story

When Tom & I were pre-teens we liked to go hunting and just shooting. I don’t remember exactly when it was but one summer we were at Grandpa & Grandma Moore’s farm. Maybe it was a time we were left there when Mom, Dad, and Marj went to New York City for a Nation Student Council meeting.

We discovered that Grandpa had one or two Guns, maybe a 22 rifle and a 4-10 shot gun. We of course wanted to use them. There was a small wooded area to the Southeast corner of the Indiana farm and we went out hunting. I don’t remember too well what happened but I do remember that the woods there were much different from the woods we were used to in Western Colorado. I discovered the same thing when I spent two year living in Virginia. First the humidity is much higher and it rains more often. The density of life the environment supports is much greater. The woods are alive. One of the things one finds is a high density of mosquitoes and other insects. There is a thick layer of decomposing things leaves, logs, etc. The trees grow dense and block out the sun in the summer. So we hunted there. I don’t think we shot anything but I felt a creepiness all the time I was there.

Grandpa loved to tease and he was a great practical joker. After we came back Grandpa told this story about how when he was a young man. He and his friends always carried shotguns. He described the structure of shot gun shells, which had a metal base with a firing cap but the majority of the outer cover was cardboard. I had taken many of these apart myself to make homemade fire works so I knew exactly what he was talking about. Down at the metal or cap end was the gunpowder. Then there were a couple of cardboard plugs and all of the buckshot and finally a cardboard stopper at the top to hold the buckshot in. When the shell was fired the gunpowder would explode and force the buckshot to fly out the shell and then the barrel in a pattern that got bigger as it flew. He and his friends would cut around the outside case of their shells at the joint between the gunpowder and the shot. They would cut just enough so that when the shell was fired it would separate and a bundle of shot would fly out of the gun still wrapped in the outer shell. This was more like a single slug except when it hit something it would explode with shot flying in all directions. When you hit something with these they were much more destructive.

The story he told was about hunting with a friend one day. He said to his friend, "I’ll throw my hat up in the air and you shoot at it and then you throw your hat up in the air and I will shoot at it." This seemed reasonable to the friend and he agreed. Grandpa of course had a cut shell in his gun. So Grandpa took off his hat and when his friend was ready he threw it as high in the air as he could and his friend shot at it and missed. Grandpa picked up his hat and dusted it off and put it back on. Then his friend took off his hat and Grandpa got ready to shoot. His friend threw his hat as high as he could. Grandpa watched the hat go up and then come down. When it hit the ground he shot it. The cut shell went out hit the hat and blew it all apart. Grandpa turned to his friend and said, "I didn’t say we had to shoot at it when it was in the air."