Chapter 35
Chapter 35
M aggie was a gift. My first from Bones. During my time at the academy, Bones taught me to shoot longer distances. A learned skill. His purpose was simple. Most movies glorified rapid rainstorms of lead. Someone shooting thousands of rounds a second, most of which never hit their intended target, while someone hid behind a couch or a bush or something totally incapable of providing cover. The Ruger 1 receiver was unlike most other modern sporting rifles. It was sleek while also tough as nails. Matter of fact, the first gunsmiths to test it commented that they simply could not blow it up. It was reminiscent of John Browning’s 1885 Winchester and the venerable Sharps and Remington rolling blocks made famous during the eradication of sixty million buffalo. But unlike most of those single-shot breach-loaders with exposed hammers, the kind you cocked with your thumb, the Ruger 1 didn’t work that way. It featured the patented function of a Scot named John Farquharson. A lever below the receiver dropped the breach, exposing the chamber, where a round was loaded before the lever was brought upward again, closing the breach and cocking the action. The “Farquharson action” was later refined by Swedish, German, and Finnish gunmakers, eventually coming to rest in the hands of Sturm, Ruger & Company, which began producing the Ruger 1 in the late 1960s.
By any description, it was a simple weapon. No frills. It was not sexy in the current tactical world of high speed, low drag, and increased magazine capacity. Its weakness, if it had one, was that it could shoot only one round at a time. Which was exactly why Bones gave her to me. The lesson was simple. Whether your weapon was belt fed, magazine fed, or hand fed, you still had only one round in the chamber. So you should make that one count. Maggie, more than any other rifle, taught me that I only needed one round. And given that I had only one, I needed to focus all my energy on it. Not the next one. Not the one after that. Only the one in the chamber. Because it was the only one that mattered. Shooting Maggie required me to slow down. Focus. Unlike the tactical precision rifles used these days, which were mostly all black, comprised of a combination of aluminum, carbon fiber, and other space-age technology, Maggie was old-school hand-oiled mahogany and blued steel.
I spread my shooter’s mat on the snow, laid Maggie across a sandbag, opened the breach, loaded a single cartridge, and rested my cheek on the stock, allowing my eyes to settle through the scope and the sight picture to materialize. Gunner nuzzled in next to me, eyes staring downrange.
The inclusion of a spotter, or a dog to keep you company, meant you had to consider their ears. Guns make loud noises. As a result, metal tubes filled with sound-muffling baffles, called suppressors, or what the media mistakenly calls silencers, can be affixed to the end of the barrel. Contrary to Hollywood myth, they don’t silence the percussion. They simply mute it slightly to make it bearable to human ears, reducing the sound by almost thirty decibels. In short, suppressors reduce recoil slightly and make the shooting more comfortable by preventing the loud bang from blowing out your eardrums. Knowledge that wasn’t too helpful when a dog didn’t understand why you were trying to put earmuffs on his head. Which Gunner didn’t tolerate. He wasn’t having it.
The target was an eight-inch round plate at 1,842 yards. In shooter’s lingo, that meant I’d have to shoot a half minute of angle or better to hit it.
The wind was at my back, 1 or 2 mph slight left to right. Chances were good it changed somewhere in the mile between me and the target, but if I missed, the rock face behind the target would indicate point of impact and I’d adjust.
With a target sitting at over a mile away, one last hurdle had to be considered. The Coriolis effect. In summary, when shooting longer distances, say anything over a thousand yards, I had to account for the effect of the earth’s rotational spin on the flight of the bullet. The bullet could be in the air for several seconds, during which the earth would continue to spin. Which meant the target that was at one spot when the trigger was pulled would not be at that same spot when the bullet arrived. This is a gross oversimplification, but let’s say you were shooting at a horse on a merry-go-round. When you pulled the trigger, the horse would be frozen in time at a given place, but three seconds later, the horse obviously would have moved given the rotation of the ride. So the bullet would hit behind the horse. Or off target. Coriolis is something like that. Or at least that was the way Bones first explained it to me. To make matters even more complicated, the earth rotates at different speeds. Faster at the poles and slower at the equator. In the northern hemisphere, when firing north or south, the bullet sways to the right. To the left in the southern. Its effect is less when firing east to west or west to east.
I let the crosshairs settle in the middle of the plate and dialed up 105 MOA, or “minutes of angle.” Most of my optics were calibrated in milliradians. Maggie was not. Maggie had been given to me before MILs became popular. Bones had spent a month’s paycheck to purchase the best Schmidt & Bender glass he could afford, and I never replaced it. Why dial in 105 MOA? Because I had zeroed my rifle at two hundred yards. Anything beyond that and the bullet would drop gradually, then severely, because bullets don’t fly in a straight line. It’s more of an arc. Think of a football in flight. If your favorite quarterback throws a ball sixty yards in the air, he can’t throw it straight. He’s not strong enough. So he arcs it a bit. Gets some air under it. Same with bullets. In aiming at a target 1,842 yards away, I couldn’t just aim straight at it. I had to compensate for the distance. In reality, given so great a distance—longer than a mile—I had to aim 2,001 inches above it. That’s 166.75 feet above the target. More than sixteen and a half stories. The only way to do that is with a scope that allows you to “dial distance.” Hence the 105 MOA.
Why travel this rabbit trail? Why all this rumination on the physics of the flight of a piece of copper? Because I needed to take my mind off what I couldn’t take my mind off. And I needed to remember that what was in me had been put there by another. Poured in. I could not take credit. Nor did I intend to.
I focused the diopter, pushed the safety to off, and slowed my breathing, watching the crosshairs steady. As I did, Bones appeared in my mind’s eye.