[tsubaki]

As normal it was a brisk January Sunday morning when me and Jay (my school age hunting and fishing buddy) headed to the woods to go hunting. Naturally being bored on the way to the woods we would prepare for rabbits on the side of the road while being ever present to the possibility of deer on the way by having one gun loaded with buckshot and one with birdshot. Well this particular morning Jay put in to drive his step fathers truck (which I was more than happy to ride shotgun instead of getting blood in my car) but it was so cold and the animals didn’t cooperate so we went to the woods edge and parked the truck to wait on daylight. Now Jay was left handed, so his mother bought him a Mossberg shotgun that had the safety on the rear of the stock. However he couldn’t remember which way was safe & fire, so he would lightly squeeze the trigger to see if it moved and if it did switch it the other way. In the truck, sitting at the edge of the woods I had now dosed off and then heard a muffled BOOM. I rolled the window down and said “Jay, somebody’s already out there and shooting”, looking to my left he’s fumbling with his gun. I asked, “what happened?” and he replied “the gun went off!” my natural response is “yeah with your finger on the trigger!”. Well the gun barrel (after blowing a hole through the floor board and transmission bell housing) had slid into the opening and lodged in the flywheel location. After a few minutes we were able to remove the new 12- gauge floor shifter. Jay asked “what’ll we do now?”. My only concern was to get back to the house or at least to a paved road for help. “You better see if this thing will move, cause we’re 8 miles from home and it’s 25 degrees outside”. Cranking it up sounded like a handful of coins in the clothes drier but it got us to the paved road. Now daylight we could see no evident damage, once the buckshot and metal rolling around in the bell housing fell out. “My step dad’s going to kill us” he said. *“Us??- your finger- your gun-us??” was my response. But now worried about me I said “just pull the carpet back in place, he won’t see the hole till he changes the clutch, plus he might sell the truck before then and don’t breath a word to anybody”. * *(more to come)