Back in the day riding two up on a motorcycle with the guy on back holding a break action single shot .410 was a pretty effective way to cover a lot of back roads and kill quite a few ruffed grouse… or so I was told…
Gun laying crossways on the passengers lap broke open with a shell easily removable and slipped back into your pocket with out much notice. About 14 or 15 years old around that time.
One time my cousin wanted to take his dads auto 20 ga. I don’t remember what kind it was but we learned that the only way to get the extra shells from the magazine into the chamber was to shoot the damned thing.
We could work the action by hand and clear the chamber but the shells in the magazine wouldn’t advance.
So we are making the usual circle in the morning fog watching for grouse on the sides of the dirt mountain roads. We come around a bend and ther sets Charlie Mountain. a legendary local game warden at the time in his truck. He stops us, we get off the bike and he goes through his usual routine of hunting license gun check and stuff. It never seemed to matter that none of us guys with dirt bikes didn’t even have a driver license, I don’t think we were ever even asked before.
Any way, Charlie going over the gun and asks if we knew that the gun has shells in the magazine. We tell him yes, and that
we don’t know how to get them out! Charlie fiddles with it for a few minutes trying everything he knows to do and nothing works. Finally he just hands the gun back shaking his head and says he ain’t never seen nothing like that.
He turns his attention to my dirt bike. He used to ride a Harley back in the day and his daughter was killed on one.
He was asking all sorts of questions about it and we were doing anything we could to get away from the fact that we still had two shells in our gun.
He said it’s been so long since he’d been on a bike that he doubted he could even start one anymore, he was in his 60s at this point. Of course we were telling him oh sure you can… we’ll he gets on it and kicks starts it. He then says I’ve probably forgot how to ride one it’s been so long. Oh no, we told him. I bet you can! Well he pulls in the clutch and puts it in gear and eases off down the road with me and my cousin standing in the middle of the road with his truck door open and a shotgun with two rounds in the mag!
He goes out of site and in a minute or so here he comes putting back with a big grin on his face like it was Christmas or something. We talk a little bit more and he sends us on our way!
As far as the auto 20, we latter found out that the only way it would advance a shell short of firing one in the chamber was to put the end of the barrel against a tree or something and shove the barrel back into the receiver about an inch or so.
How times change.
