Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigThompson
Lord a 24” EH would be awesome , I “expect” it’s safe to assume they were relatively open . So that would make the perfect “Archibald Rutledge” deer drive gun with my handloads of 0 or #1 buck . Of course I’d need to get in a group or club and I ain’t really a deer club kinda hunter LOL’s!
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Craig,
I'm also not a deer club hunter, but when I was young, growing up on the Peninsula of VA (in the Williamsburg, Jamestown, Yorktown area) my Dad got us into a "club" of sorts that included guys from our church. It was really a poor man's deer club, with only about 400 acres, but those acres were adjacent to the Colonial Parkway and Cheatam Annex. We did not run dogs on such a small holding, but every now and then the Club "leader" (the guy that knew the judge who owned the land and got us permission to hunt there) would use a beagle to push the deer from an overgrown field. I was just a kid, but I remember the feeling when a deer bounded just ahead of that short-legged beagle. There was a big club that had holdings on what is now Busch Gardens near Williamsburg. I do recall going with Pop to watch a hunt. It was the full-blown pack-of-hounds-running-deer-by-standers affair. We were just observers, but my childhood memories were some of the best of those early days. I, too, am a fan of Rutledge, and I looked into the prospects of buying into a hunt over hounds in the Southern tradition. I've not found anything available, but I do sometimes dream of using one of my Parkers (I think my EH might be too tightly choked) on such a hunt. I really don't care to kill another deer, but it would sure be nice to conjure up something of the tradition...especially with a Parker.
I hope you find that 24" EH! Let us know when you do.