Free The Rifle by Gary Paulsen Page A

stack of rough-sawn “blanks”—dry pieces of gun-stock wood crudely hand sawn by a carpenter named Davis specifically to sell to Cornish for use in making rifle stocks. These were blocky pieces of wood only just recognizable as being for gun stocks, and usually they were of plain cherry or walnut and suitable only for rough trade guns.
    Except tied in the middle of the bundle was a special piece of wood. It was six feet long, with the grain curved down naturally where the butt, or shoulder piece, came back, and when he pulled it from the bundle it seemed to come alive in his hands. The feeling was so startling that he dropped the blank back on the pile. As he picked it up again he saw that it was a slab of well-dried maple, but this was not uncommon, and it was not until he looked closer that he saw the small marks scattered over the surface of the wood and knew it was a piece of striped or “curly” maple. In the rough-sawn texture they looked almost like blemishes, scars, but he knew them at once as almost classic “bird’s eyes”—tiny knots that would make the wood seem spotted and tiger striped when it was smooth-finished and oiled.
    He had never seen so many of the spots and stripes, never seen such a potentially beautiful gun stock, and he decided in that instant he would make a rifle to match the stock, would make the rifle of his dreams and drawings.
    And yet it did not happen fast. He still had to live, to eat, and during the days he made trade guns and did repairs and did not work on his special rifle until after the evening meal. Usually it was dark by then and he had to work in candlelight, which slowed him still more, and it was perhaps this reason, the slowness of his work, that caused him to take even more care than he would normally have taken.
    Whatever the reason, he lingered over each part of the rifle with a kind of love.
    Making the barrel itself took him almost six months of night work. He used his best steel strap and hot-forged it around a .30–caliber tube so that it was forty-two inches long, then bored it out to .40 caliber with a long drill bit. Using such a small bore—.40 inches in diameter—when many rifles and guns were made at .58 and even .75 inches was a change, but in his experience the smaller bore seemed to throw balls with more accuracy, and he wanted this rifle to be not just beautiful but as close to perfectly accurate as he could make it. When the blank barrel was formed and hammer-welded around the bore tube, he removed the tube and trued the barrel with a thin thread lined on all sides and down the center of the bore to make certain it was straight Trucing: alone took weeks, working late, and when he reached that stage he still did not have a finished barrel but really only one that had started.
    By hand he draw-filed the outside of the barrel to have six flat sides, trueing with the thread as he worked so the flats were perfect and equal, and another two months had gone, working in the evenings in the yellow light from the candles.
    Fall came and he should have gone hunting to stock up on venison for the winter, but work owned him now and each day he awakened thinking not of what he would do in the day but later, in the yellow light from the tallow candles.
    With the barrel formed and the outside filed and hand-buffed, he worked at the rifling, and here again fate stepped in. He had been working with slower twists and he decided with this new rifle he would go with Waynewright’s faster twist of one turn in thirty-five inches. He did not know it but it was the perfect twist for a .40–caliber bore shooting a patched ball with black powder.
    The rifling was done with a long wooden rod that had adjustable sharpened steel teeth in a fixture at one end. The rod had a spiral groove down one side that fit into a circular holder, and as the rod was pushed down into the barrel, a small metal peg engaged the groove and caused the rod