A Boy’s Rite of Passage

MY GENERATION GREW up handling guns and hunting game. I first became familiar with guns and the smell of gun oil around 1957. On my 7th birthday I received my first gun, a .177 Diana Model 1 airgun. It was a break-barrel with a blue tinplate action and a wooden stock. Eventually, as the gun became worn from use, you could watch the pellet in flight.

At the time, we had a dairy farm on the eastern border of British Colonial Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), where I was born. The Diana constituted my introduction to gun safety and to going out shooting on my own. My dad periodically hunted for the larder, kudu being the venison of choice. He had a WWII era Oberndorf Mauser in 7x57, but I wasn’t allowed to handle it unless he was cleaning it.

Within two years of