Free The Rifle by Gary Paulsen Page B

to rotate as it was pushed.
    Ten pushes, until the steel teeth on the rod had made the beginnings of four rifling grooves in the bore of the barrel. Then the teeth were adjusted to cut a tiny bit deeper—little more than scratches at first—and ten more pushes, then adjust, and ten more; two whole weeks of evenings until he held the barrel up to the candle and looked down to see the clean lands and grooves of finished rifling. But not quite, not quite done yet. The metal of the rifling was still slightly rough, with tiny scratches from the cutting teeth, and Cornish used a ramrod and soaked in lard and fine strained sand used for blotting ink, and he polished the bore until it shone like silver—a week’s work.
    With the bore done, he threaded one end and screwed in a breech plug with a tang sticking back to attach to the wood and then farther up, along the bottom of the barrel, he made three cross grooves with widened bottoms to hold the metal keys that would affix the rifle to the wood of the stock.
    Still the work on the barrel was not finished. Cornish buffed the steel with the fine sand and then finer sand—as fine as flour—running a rag filled with the sand-dust back and forth on the barrel until the flats seemed to be small mirrors that caught the light as he turned the rifle near the candle.
    When the steel was shined and cleaned, he set it aside and went to his neighbor, who had a cow for milk, and captured two quarts of the cow’s urine in a wooden bucket. Because of the smell the next step had to be done outside, and he did it the following day, taking a rare day away from his normal work time.
    He heated the barrel until it was nearly red, then soaked it with a rag dipped in the urine. The steam that came up almost made him gag, but he knew what finish he wanted and he repeated the process eight times, reheating the barrel each time for a fresh coat of urine, wiping it on with the steaming, stinking, smoking rag, moving it always with the long direction of the barrel until the acids and compounds in the urine had reacted with the hot steel to oxidize it and make it a deep plum-brown color. Satisfied at last that the barrel was dark enough, he let it cool, wiped it with a clean soft rag and then another rag impregnated with refined cooking grease.
    The barrel was beautiful. The grease coated and soaked into the color of the steel to make it seem deep and rich, so that he could look into the steel itself, and he wrapped the barrel in a piece of sheepskin with the wool inward and set it on a top shelf of his small shop while he worked on roughing out the stock.
    He used small handsaws and chisels to carve the rough shape of the stock. It was the fashion then to have the butt, the part that went back to the shoulder, drop a great deal to give the stock a more elegant curve downward. This was the method used in Europe with guns, and many smiths in the colony copied it, thinking it made for a better weapon. In truth Cornish had found the extra drop to the stock gave the stock a sort of leverage that caused a rifle to bounce slightly up when it was fired, which diminished accuracy, and the recoil slammed backward harder because of the angle.
    For this reason he reversed the principle and had the stock only drop half as much as usual. This minimized the kick of the rifle and at the same time held the barrel more steady, and while in itself it would perhaps not have made a difference, this added to the extralong barrel, small bore, and fast-twist rifling all came together to make a unique firearm.
    It was still far from finished. The wood had to be grooved to let the three flats of the barrel settle in properly, and he struck a centerline and used a correctly shaped burr—a kind of push-pull chisel—to make the groove. Here he ran into trouble. The maple was seasoned to a rock hardness—some maple was actually called rock maple—and he resharpened the burr many times while