My first trip east of the mountains for Mule Deer was a great success- but we didn’t get a deer. Yeah, I’d have liked to, but this trip was about learning the ropes, and that mission was accomplished with flying colors; I learned a lot. Mind you, if we’d had doe tags, (or been willing to bend the rules a wee bit) we’d both have brought home deer. Don’t consider it a failure of hunting; consider it a triumph of ethics.

Most people who aren’t from here think of Washington as lush and green, with a hilly, forested landscape and fields stretching from salt-water to the mountains, and it is that… west of the Cascade Mountains. But that’s only half the state, and half the story. East of them everything changes. Eastern Washington ranges from arid prairie to outright desert. About one-third of America’s wheat is grown here, a fact which even many Washington residents are unaware.

Coming over the mountains you cross the Columbia Gorge, by some reckoning the largest canyon in the continental US. Depending on your route you might see nothing but what appears to be gently rolling hills covered in wheat fields, only occasionally traversing areas of table-lands, buttes and canyons. But get off the highway and onto the backroads and the story changes. Once you get out among those hills it quickly becomes apparent; this place is seriously tore up.

Nestled between those gently rolling hills are ravines, gullies and canyons choked with sagebrush, where the terrain ranges from ‘Wow, this is rough,’ to ‘Oh, hell no!’

Some time around the end of the Ice Age an ice dam ruptured and spilled a volume of water roughly the size of Lake Michigan across the landscape that would someday be the central part of eastern Washington, and absolutely shredded the landscape. Time has softened much of the damage in the ages since, but the raw scars of nature’s fury still persist. These are the Channeled Scablands, and this is where you hunt mule deer.

I’m 57 years old, sixty pounds overweight and not in particularly good condition, so I viewed the prospect of this hunt with as much trepidation as excitement. Legal Mule Deer weigh around 300 lbs. or more. If you shoot one, even gutted and quartered you’ll be humping 170-200 lbs. of meat and bone back to the truck. Yes, the truck- you’re going to need one, and it had better be four-wheel drive. We’ll get back to that later.

You are also going to need a hunting partner. It’s not safe to hunt alone here; cell reception is dodgy at best, and like I said, this place is tore up. In addition to uneven or rough terrain you are contending with sagebrush, jagged basalt ranging from rocks to boulders, badger holes that can be stepped in… at least by hunting season the rattlesnakes have hibernated. Probably. The disaster-factor is just too high to be worth the risks. You turn an ankle or, worse yet, bust a leg and you’re screwed without someone to help or get help. Plus unless you are Superman you will need help humping that meat out. If you think the ground is tricky, imagine trying it with 90 lbs. of deer in your pack.

Sure, you might shoot your deer on decent ground; the deer often come out to graze on the tender shoots of Winter Wheat that are coming up this time of year. But you’d best come prepared to get down into that bad land, because that’s where the deer go between meals.

So, it seems the common way to hunt them is to drive the backroads in your 4×4 and look for deer. Depending on where you are these roads can be pretty decent or stray well into ‘are you sure that’s a road?’ territory. They can also change from one to the other in the middle. Jake and I were in his Toyota Tundra, and we never actually had to engage four-wheel drive. But if Mother Nature had dropped so much as a mild shower on us we would have needed it.

That’s a distinct possibility; the weather at this time of year is… let’s call it whimsical. When Jake was there just three days before it was freezing. When we were there it was in the fifties and sunny much of the time, but as we were heading home it went from ‘partially cloudy’ to full-on thunderstorm in about an hour.

Oh, and if you shoot a deer at a good distance, keep a sharp lookout when you come up on it. There are coyotes and mountain lions about, and they have been known to dispute the ownership of a carcass on occasion. If coyotes are inclined to make an issue of it most folks just shoot ’em. A cougar, though… that’s a whole ‘nuther kettle of fish. You don’t want to shoot them if you can avoid it. Likely a warning shot will drive them off, but if you have to shoot one it’s going to be a hassle. Not to mention it just seems like a damn shame to shoot such a magnificent creature.

OK, this really isn’t the terrifying ordeal I might be implying. Most of it is proper old-man hunting. You sit in your comfy seat and sip coffee while you creep along, keeping your eyes peeled and binoculars handy. If you spot a deer you stop, scope it out and see if it’s legal to shoot. Currently that means a three-point or more. You are going to see a hell of a lot more spikes, does and yearlings than you are three-pointers, but don’t despair. If there’s a bunch of does there will be a buck nearby. The trick is whether or not he’ll present himself.

We headed out from our quarters in Soap Lake around dawn and headed north-west of town. It being a weekday we didn’t see many other hunters out, which was good news and bad. On the one hand there were fewer folk trying to shoot the few legal deer. On the other hand there was no one stirring them up and getting them moving. A moving deer is hugely easier to spot than a stationary one.

The first hour we saw one lone doe ambling along the edge of a field, far out of range. My rule of thumb (if I don’t have a doe tag, which I have never had the luck to obtain) is one doe is just a lone doe. You see two or more does and there’s a buck nearby. We found a spot where we had cell reception, so Jake pulled off to get his bearings. I stepped out to stretch my legs and have a cigarette (yeah yeah, I know…) and something told me I should step up on the scrub-covered hillock beside the road. When I did two does stood up less than twenty yards out and started to lope away.

“We got does!” I hollered back to Jake, and he came over pronto. By the time the they were forty yards away they were joined by two spike-bucks, and they all trotted up the ravine- but any one of them could just as easily have been a three-point or more. Had that been the case I could have simply stepped the legal distance off the road (100 feet) and easily taken any of them. If I had had my rifle… oops. We watched them for a bit until they were out of sight, got back in the truck and moved on.

A few miles further on we spotted another doe at the edge of the sagebrush about two-hundred yards out. We stopped and Jake grabbed the binoculars, and shortly announced “They’re does, and there’s two of them.” By then I’d snagged my rifle and was looking them over through the scope. “Three of them, actually,” I said.

One of them was standing facing me, and if she’d been a legal buck it would have been child’s play to drop her. I found that curiously heartening. Finally they moved off through the sagebrush, and picked up some friends along the way; when they cleared the brush on the far side there were eight of them, though none of them appeared to be three-points or better. They moved off across the open hillside until they were out of sight, and we got in the truck to see if we could find a cross-road that would put us ahead of them. We couldn’t, and as it was then coming onto eleven AM we called it a morning.

We grabbed some lunch and rested up, then headed out for the evening hunt. We checked back where we’d seen the small herd, but had no luck despite Jake crossing the field and prowling along the edge of the sagebrush while I watched for movement from a distance. With dark coming on we called it a day. Even driving back to town is a hazard; we damn near hit two yearlings in different spots on the way back! We had a good dinner and passed a pleasant evening chatting and watching The Ranch on Netflix.

Next time I’ll tell you about day two of the hunt, and some of the lessons learned. I’ll also have some of Jake’s pictures by then, and they’ll be way better than mine; he had a proper camera and is a photographer.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 18 October 2019

I took a twenty-year hiatus from hunting, and since I have returned to it I’ve been going for black-tails at a friends property, which we refer to as ‘The Happy Hunting Grounds.’ Since one seldom even sees a deer beyond fifty yards there my home-grown 7.35mm Carcano carbine‘s iron sights have been just fine. I actually sold my scoped .30-06 because it really didn’t seem like I’d need it. Oops… but more on that later.

This year I had a hankerin’ to try something different; Eastern Washington Mule Deer. I figured to take my Abilene .44 magnum, mount an optic and try my luck. I picked up a Bushnell TRS-25 red dot and planned to mount a rail on the gun. Likely with the right load and a little practice I’d be good-to-go out to 75-100 yards.

…or not. My buddy Jake offered to drag my sorry ass along on his hunt in Eastern Washington, where shots of 100-300 yards happen. Too long for me with a handgun, and I’ve always figured the Carcano to be a 100-yard gun, given my aging eyes and the iron sights. I bemoaned selling the .30-06 to Linda, and she shrugged and said, “So buy a scoped rifle. Pinto’s will have something…”

Is it any wonder I love this woman beyond reason?

Pinto’s did, of course, have something. I was spoiled for choice, in fact. I don’t know if this holds true across the country, but on the used market here a scoped rifle sells for about the same price as one without a scope mounted. Even restricting myself to a scoped rifle in one of a few specific calibers I had a number of options. The one I finally bought was a Remington Model 660 in .243 Winchester. It has a TruGlo scope mounted and a sling. The scope isn’t the best out there, but it’s serviceable, and the sling is a bonus; saved me the time and modest expense of purchasing and mounting one. Another bonus is that the plastic trigger-guard has been replaced by an aluminum unit, which is quite a bit more robust.

The Model 660 was an improved version of the Model 600 carbine; among other changes the sight rib was eliminated and the barrel lengthened by two inches. Over 45,000 of these carbines were made from 1968-1971, after which it was replaced by the Model 600 Mohawk.

I felt that as old, fat and out of shape as I am the handy 6.5 lb. rifle was just about ideal, and the modest recoil and flat trajectory of the .243 Winchester was suited to the task. I got three boxes of PPU 100gr. Spitzer bullets (so I’d have plenty to practice) and headed for Renton Fish and Game Club to try her out.

I got a zeroing target and set it out at 100 yards, though I figured the odds of the rifle already being sighted in to be high. Just for giggles I decided to shoot the first three-shot string standing/unsupported. This produced a 2″ group very slightly high/left. Not shabby at all! Recoil was moderate, the action very smooth and the trigger light, with a nice clean break.

Okay, time to shoot from a rest and see what she’ll really do. I set out the rest with a couple of sandbags and fired my three-shot string, then moved to the spotting scope to check the results. Huh… a 2″ group. Better knuckle down and try harder… Rinse and Repeat, checked the spotting scope and saw another 2″ group. Huh again…

Hmmm… I broke out the range’s Steady Rest, mounted the rifle and fired another string. 2″ group. OK then, good enough.

After much discussion with other firearms boffins I figure this is simply the limit of what this rifle can do with that cartridge. PPU is OK ammo, but it’s no one’s idea of a premium round. For this season it’s good enough; after hunting season I’ll work up some handloads and see what happens.

So, Wednesday morning at zero-dark-hundred Jake and I will hop in Moby Truck and head for the Channelled Scablands, a region of gullies and badlands in Eastern Washington cut into the desert by a massive super-flood during the last ice age. With any luck we’ll bring home some venison. Either way I’ll let you know how it goes.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 13 November 2019

This is not a review of the Standard Arms S333 Thunderstruck; I haven’t so much as seen one in person. Yes, I’ll be talking about this, uh, let’s call it innovative little gun, but this is mostly about a different concept for the role, and why Tinker Should Not Be Left Unsupervised.

Aside from the ‘coming soon to a science fiction movie near you’ looks this gun is odd, innovative and maybe even a little bit cool. It’s designed around the old civilian self-defense saw, ‘Three seconds, three shots, three yards,’ thus the name. This is a very focussed self-defense piece. It’s designed to put four, not three, rounds on target very quickly at three yards. It does this by being weirder than it looks in the picture above.

It’s double-barrelled, and fires two rounds of .22 Magnum per trigger pull. No, it is not a ‘machine gun’ according to the BATFmen, so don’t even go there. Yes, it doesn’t have a proper trigger-guard, but this doesn’t seem to be a problem because of the design. You cannot easily pull the trigger by accident because of the Glock-style trigger safety on the upper part of the trigger, and the exceptionally heavy double-action only trigger pull. Some reviewers have estimated that pull at 16+ lbs., but with two fingers on the trigger everyone seems to be finding it manageable. Smooth even. The gun even seems to be reasonably accurate at three yards and not hopeless at five, but that’s about the practical limit.

A lot of innovative thinking went into this gun. It’s not just ‘out of the box,’ I’m not sure Standard Manufacturing’s engineers were aware there was a box. And Standard Manufacturing has been around the block a time or two; Google them and you’ll see what I mean.

At an MSRP of $369 this gun is in the right ballpark for a small defensive revolver. You can find more information here- http://tdgun.com/s333/

Having never seen one in person or handled one several things occur to me. First is that Standard Manufacturing has been around for a while, and they make some genuinely premium-quality products. You can question the concept, but the quality is liable to be first-rate.

The second thing that occurs is that it appears to be about the size of a J-frame .38. Yes, it fires eight shots instead of five- but it’s effectively a four-shot. Pull the trigger four times and it’s empty. Not sure I’m keen on that, but it isn’t a deal-breaker. Also if I am carrying a .22 I’d like it to be significantly smaller than a J-frame.

Are two shots of .22 Magnum more effective than a Federal 130gr. HST Micro? I don’t know. I doubt that they are notably less effective as long as the shooter does their part.

The last concern may be spurious and entirely personal. I can quickly and reliably put hits on target as far away as twenty-five yards with a DOA J-Frame. By all accounts that’s not going to happen with the S333. I know, the likelihood I would ever need to shoot a target more than five yards away in a self-defense scenario are infinitesimal. It’s probably silly, but I like the idea that at need I could.

I have to admit, the novelty and reasonable price are tempting. I like oddball guns. But I am pretty sure after the novelty wore off I’d be right back to my usual carry guns, so I might as well save myself some money.

I buggered up my back the other day fixing the fence, so I have been on my arse all day today. I’m not good at that, and I got to thinking about compact-carry revolvers. I don’t know if the S333 is a ‘better mousetrap,’ but there might be one out there. After I got bored enough I grabbed some paper and a pencil and started sketching. Here’s what I came up with:

I’ll spare you all the pages of messy pencil sketches. The concept here is a last-ditch or back-up revolver. I designed it around .22 Magnum, but it could chamber .22LR just as easily. There’s room for .32 ACP but I am not sure that the mechanism is robust enough. In size it’s between an NAA micro-revolver like the Pug and a J-frame S&W. It’s DAO and has a 1-3/8″ barrel, though that would be the easiest thing to change. It has an Ergo-style sub-compact grip, but again that would be easy to change.

It uses a sliding trigger, and three of the five moving parts on the gun are part of that trigger-unit. The sliding bar actuates the top-hinged concealed hammer, and fires the round. The barrel is located at 6-o’clock like a Chiappa Rhino. This is less for recoil-management- it’s a .22- and more because it allows the use of the simple, compact mechanism.

To load you pull the latch located in front of the cylinder forward and tip the barrel and cylinder up. As conceived there is no ejector; the philosophy of use doesn’t demand the ability to reload in a hurry. Fitting an auto-ejector is possible, but it would increase the expense of making it by a lot.

For sights I’d put a fiber-optic front and a U-notch rear. The sights are deliberately close together; having both sights in the same focal-plane makes up for the short sight radius in my experience.

Does such a gun fill a legitimate nitch? Sure. Does it fill it better than guns that are already on the market? Doubtful. Was I less bored this afternoon? Absolutely.

Some of you are probably wondering if I am planning on making one. Nope. While the design presents no novel challenges to a good machinist (I’m not) with a modern, fully-equipped shop (which I don’t have) it’s beyond what I can produce in my knife-making shop. It was, and it remains, a way to pass the tedious hours of forced inactivity. A mental exercise if you will.

On the other hand if you know someone with the resources and a burning desire to build a novel gun of dubious utility that does too little and costs too much, by all means send them my way!

Michael Tinker Pearce, 27 September 2019