billrquimby

I shot my last mule deer with a 6.5 Remington Magnum, an overlooked and often controversial caliber, mostly because it was introduced in the Remington Model 600 carbine. Mine is a Model 700, with a longer barrel that gives it much better ballistics. It does everything I want from a small-caliber rifle. With 140-grain bullets it is suitable for everything in Arizona, including elk out to 300 yards. In Europe, the 6.5x55 is used on everything from 60-pound roe deer to 750-pound moose. Bill Quimby

In 1955 or 56, after reading an Outdoor Life magazine article about the Burnham brothers and the calling they were doing in Texas. I ordered one of their calls and drove to the ranch where my uncle's brother was a foreman (It's Catalina State Park now), walked up the hill behind his house and started blowing the call. Within a minute or two, a coyote came running across the highway and darned near got hit by a bus! I shot the coyote at 10 yards with my .303 Model 99 Savage, and immediately got hooked on calling. Over the next three decades, I called in a bear, two mountain lions, maybe a dozen bobcats, four or five badgers, assorted hawks and owls, twenty to thirty foxes, 100 or more coatis, and 200 or so coyotes. I missed the bear and lions, as well as about half of the others, for various reasons. About the time the electronic callers came out in the early 1980s, I very rarely called. I still have a half dozen of the calls I used to use and may try it again. At any rate, I suspect your problem may be that the predators in most areas already have been educated by other callers. Heading south toward Oracle Junction, for example, will put you in range of callers from Tucson heading north. You may also want to try mouth-blown calls. Each caller imparts his/her own tone that is completely different from the recorded calls. Good luck, keep trying, and it will happen. Bill Quimby

Get a couple of friends together and try my pit-barbecue method, and you will change your mind. Bill Quimby

I also said green hammer. Amanda, great minds obviously think alike. Bill Quimby

"Bill Quimby adds an interesting twist. He places it on a board and then buries it. Perhaps Bill meant to say that he puts it in a plywood casket and then buries it." I think you are confused about a post that commented on mine. I take a half of javelina slathered with barbecue sauce, salt, pepper and crushed garlic, and place it in a clean but old pillowcase, then wrap it with about 1/4 inch of wet newspapers and tie the package up with baling wire. I then repeat the process with the other half, and any other meat I want to cook. About an hour before I put the packages in a hole I've dug in the arroyo below my house, I fill the pit with mesquite and set it afire. When the wood has turned to coals about 10-12 inches deep, I put a half sheet of tin roofing directly on the coals and place the packages on the tin. Another half piece of tin goes over that, and then I cover the hole until no smoke leaks out of the ground (this is important). I dig it up 24 hours later and use a hay hook to pull out the packages When unwrapped, you can grab a bone and shake the meat off it! I think even Lark's old boots would come out of a pit tasting delicious when cooked this way. I've cooked bears, raccoons, mountain lions, as well as beef, pork, deer and elk, of course, in pits. Problem is, it is a lot of work and it isn't worth the effort unless you are feeding a lot of people. Friends and I used to host three-day pig and quail hunts for 40-50 people every January from the Lander Wyoming One Shot Antelope Hunt, and we'd cook all the javelinas we'd killed the previous season and serve it and tortillas, boiled beans, salad and sangria to our guests. We stopped holding these events when permits were required for archery javelina hunting. We would use an entire cord of mesquite to cook eight or nine javeinas. Bill Quimby

I must confess I tried road hunting once, but I didn't find it challenging. There are roads everywhere. My main problem was I didn't know what to do with it after I shot one. Bill Quimby

I'm with Lark on this. The only way I've found to eat javelina meat is to bury and barbecue it for 24 hours in a mesquite-fired pit, and that's a lot of work unless you have three or four to do at one time. Haven't tried a Crock Pot, and may do it some day because I love to hunt them. Problem is, I'd have to cook it outside because my wife and I hate the smell when it is cooking. Bill Quimby

I must admit I went road hunting once. It wasn't much of a challenge. Roads are everywhere. Problem is, what do you after you shoot one? Bill Quimby

Beautiful. Thanks for posting, Doug. Bill Quimby

I cannot even estimate the number of times I've crossed the Salt River Canyon, or the number of whitetails I've seen in that canyon or in the first few miles of the highway north of there. Bill Quimby

The most unlikely place I've seen a whitetail in Arizona was about 25-30 years ago in 37B, on Black Mountain, off the Willow Springs Road north of Oracle, smack dab in what should be mule deer country. As for whitetails in unit 1, there are a few along Hall, Rosey and Benny creeks just outside of Greer that we see sometimes, and I suppose they're as far downstream as South Fork. Bill Quimby

Congratulations, Tony! Well deserved. Bill Quimby

Wow! It makes me wonder how much Queen Michelle had to do with planning that cafeteria's menu, with her being such a nutritionist and all. As for not forgetting, the problem is we old farts are dropping dead every day and our youngsters are not being told what the Japanese did to Americans -- and could do again. I am reminded of it every time I see friends driving their Jap cars and trucks. It makes no difference if those things were assembled in the States. Just follow the money and you'll find it is going to people who killed many hundreds of thousands of Americans in the most horrible of ways. Bill Quimby

How did that bear get in your underwear? Bill Quimby

Isn't the foam that is injected into taxidermy foams the same stuff they spray between studs to insulate homes? If so, and it is as toxic as you say, wouldn't it have have been banned by building codes long ago? Bill Quimby

It obviously resented being called a "javi." Bill Quimby

I seldom listen to Glen Beck, but I did catch his broadcast today and heard him tell about a school cafeteria somewhere that served Japanese food to commemorate Pearl Harbor Day. I was so angry I could spit. I was only five years old on Sunday, December 7, 1941, but I still can remember listening to the radio reports that day and reading (I could read newspapers at age 4) the Yuma Daily Sun's articles on Monday about that attack in Hawaii. My father joined the Seabees the next day and by the end of the week was in a boot camp in California. He spent the duration in the Philippines and New Guinea, and I did not see him again until after the war. Sadly, the 2,400 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor were only the beginning. Hundreds of thousands more Americans died at the hands of the Japanese in that war. Some of my friends lost their fathers, older brothers or uncles, and I grew up hearing and reading about the hundreds of barbaric Japanese atrocities all across the South Pacific and Asia. As a result I have never forgotten how brutally the Japanese treated their prisoners, the Chinese and the residents of all the islands they invaded. It makes my blood boil to realize that today's kids are taught how terrible America was to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities and are not told why it was necessary and how many American lives were saved because of those bombs. Everyone knows about the Holocaust in Europe, but how many have heard about the many Japanese war crimes? The following is from Wikipedia: "It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%." Seventy years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, I still will not knowingly buy an automobile or any big-ticket item made by a company whose profits are returned to that accursed island. Bill Quimby

Running after a mountain lion is not a symptom of craziness. It's when someone is compelled to bark when running that he needs to worry. Bill Quimby

"just wait until they are able to get some dna to breed with an elephant and make a wooly mamoth or a mastodon and turn this place into a wooly mammoth recovery area." Lark: You definitely are clairvoyant. There are several stories on the internet about how Japanese scientists isolated usable DNA samples from the marrow of a frozen mammoth leg bone found recently in Siberia. They say they will recreate one or more of the beasts within the next five years. It's not Jurassic Park, but it's close. Mammoth bone fragments found at more than 50 "digs" across Arizona might be enough to cause those things to be released here. If that happens, the younger guys on this forum may want to consider making a down payment on a .600 double rifle before the price really goes up. Bill Quimby

We used most of a roll of paper when we marked the trail. We had to park a half mile from the bait so our vehicle wouldn't run the lions off the bait when we drove up an hour before daylight. The trackers had cleared every leaf and branch from our trail after we hung the bait. At age 75 I cannot say I haven't had little accidents like your old guy at the huntin' club. That's why you will never hear me roar. Incidentally, one of the guys with me was a tracker who was carrying an axe he had made from a hardwood tree root and a piece of car spring. The PH said that axe was a better weapon than our big rifles (I had a .416 Weatherby, the PH had a .458) if a lion got up close and personal. I was so impressed with that axe that I bought it. Bill Quimby

Lark: That's for sure, my friend. Right after WWII, the Yuma Rod and Gun Club used to pit barbecue wild burros, as part of an effort to remove burros from desert bighorn country. It was a big event in a little river town where not much happened. The best meat came from the colts. Wildlife managers (they still were called game wardens then) encouraged everyone to shoot every burro they saw. I did my part and ate a few burros while in high school. All that changed when the U.S. Wild and Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act passed and became law in 1971. Later the BLM came up with its "adopt a burro" program. I wrote a column saying that "bullets for burros" would have been a better idea, and the entire world jumped on me. Bill Quimby

Lark: If that zoo tiger's roar got to you, you ought to try -- in minimum moonlight -- following little bits of toilet paper set out along a trail through the brush toward where you hung a zebra carcass for bait the previous afternoon. You and the two guys with you have to move very quietly because although a 500-pound lion is roaring at the bait, the lioness with him will hear a twig break and you have no idea where she is. When you finally enter your blind (it's made of grass and sticks) the lion roars again. He is between the blind and the bait just 10 yards away, but it's still too dark to see him. Later, you will learn the lions walked the same trail you did, and even spent some time inside your blind. If walking up to an African lion in the dark doesn't raise the little hairs on the back of your neck, nothing will! Bill Quimby

AZmetalman is correct. There is no legal way your son can legally fly with blackpowder, any of the substitutes or percussion caps. In years past, guys used to reload a couple of boxes of shotgun shells with blackpowder and caps, but it didn't take long for it to reach the security guards. Tell him to arrange to have someone in Nebraska buy what he needs and have it waiting for him. It's not worth the risk of a felony conviction. Bill Quimby

Congratulations, TJ. Even with a bum knee you collected a very nice buck and continued your what-must-be-a-record string of Arizona elk kills, both just weeks apart. I'm impressed. Bill Quimby

Lark: Know what you mean. I've also buried horses (my daughter's Shetland and my niece's quarter horse that we stabled), and both instances brought tears to my eyes. But I also spent age 5 to 9-1/2 eating horse meat during World War II. Beef and pork were rationed by the War Department, and my mother was supporting us on my father's meager Seabees checks and her low-paying job. She traded her meat ration stamps for cash or other stamps and bought non-rationed horse meat. All the grocery stores in Yuma sold it. Don't remember what it tasted like, but do remember that it was a brighter red than beef. It must have been tasty, because I was a finicky eater as a boy. I've also eaten a lot of zebra filets in African hunting camps. It is delicious! Zebra fat is a bright yellow, even after being cooked, though. Don't remember horse meat having yellow fat, but wouldn't be surprised if it did. When beef climbs to $25-$30 per pound and higher in the inflation that surely will come unless something is done about America's multi-trillions debt soon, a lot of us who are living on fixed incomes will be eating horse meat again. Bill Quimby