My daddy purchased a semi-automatic Remington Model 742 Woodsmaster from JCPenney the same year I was born. He topped it with a simple Bushnell 4×32 scope; it was easily the biggest purchase he’d made in a long time, probably one he could barely afford. But for a man who hunted to put meat on the table, that rifle wasn’t a luxury.
That gun became Daddy’s pride and joy. He carried it with him through the Virginia mountains for more than 40 years and killed more deer with it than he could remember. The walnut stock and steel receiver were nothing fancy, but they were tough and honest — like him.
The Model 742 was known for its mild recoil and quick follow-up shots. It also had a reputation for being fussy if not cleaned properly. But my dad babied that rifle and kept it far cleaner than his truck (and he also loved his truck.) Daddy broke it down at the kitchen table after every season, wiping every nook and cranny like it was something sacred.
He let me hold that rifle for the first time on Thanksgiving morning in 1986 while he field-dressed a big doe. Before that, I wasn’t allowed to touch it. He didn’t trust me to handle it with the care he believed it deserved. I knew he was giving me a big responsibility, entrusting me with one of his most prized possessions. It felt like he had laid the whole world in my hands.
I toted that rifle slung across my right shoulder, my own beat-up 30-30 hanging from my left, while he dragged that deer over rough terrain toward the truck. Well after dark, Daddy’s headlamp was the only visible light in the woods. It felt like 10 miles of rocks, laurel, and deadfall before we hit the road — or what we had thought was the road.
We’d come out too low, in a steep-sided creek bed, staring straight up at the road some 30 yards over our heads.
Daddy shined his light up the embankment and sighed. Then he started hauling that deer straight up the hill, his boots sliding through the dead leaves over scree, losing at least as much ground as he was gaining.
“Alice! Hike up there and see if you can flag somebody down to help us!”
But I was only about 13, maybe 80 pounds soaking wet, drowning in too-big boots and weighed down by two guns that seemed to be getting heavier by the minute. That 742 alone felt like a heavy lead pipe with a scope. But I tried. I climbed tree to tree, hauling myself slowly upward, Daddy shouting out behind me.
“Watch out for the scope, dammit!”
“Don’t beat up my gun!”
“I told you to be careful!”
We made it to the road eventually, sweating through our layers despite the freezing cold. I sat on the deer while Daddy hiked up the road to get the truck. Nobody ever stopped to help.
For more than twenty seasons, I followed that man — and that rifle — through the woods. I once held it, loaded and ready, when a bunch of strange men pulled into our backcountry campsite in the middle of the night. Daddy was headed out to meet them when he handed it to me.
“Whatever you do, don’t shoot me,” he said.
My father wasn’t particularly sentimental. He was tough as nails and often critical of me when I was growing up. But he showed his love in other ways. Like taking me hunting when I was itchy to go, even when I was unable to sit still. The hearty shoulder slap he delivered when I killed my first deer. The gentle way he used the blood to paint two thick stripes across my cheeks.
Years later, my oldest son, Daniel, hiked with us in the mountains, watching that same rifle sway across his grandfather’s back. By then, the checkering had worn smooth, and the stained wood had dulled with age.
Daddy died in 2017. He suffered a heart attack on the last day of the Virginia deer season. He hung on for two days in the hospital. I had the privilege of being with him when he took his last breath. My mom and my youngest three children were there, too. But Daniel, serving in the Army, didn’t make it in time. When I had to tell him over the phone that his granddaddy was gone, I could hear the weight of it drop into his chest like a stone.
When the Army finally let Daniel go, he drove through snow and ice from Fort Bragg to Hampton to be with his family. After hugging each of us, he walked straight into the spare bedroom, slid the gun case out from under the bed, and took that Model 742 into his shaking hands. He held it to his shoulder and placed his cheek tenderly against the stock. And cried big, heavy tears into that walnut stock.
It was the closest he could get to hugging his grandfather goodbye.
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The following season, I got to watch my younger son, Silas, take a shot at a buck with the same rifle — a beautiful 125-yard shot. Freestanding. No rest. His cheek pressed to the same worn wood that held my father’s face through hundreds of shots. One shot dropped that buck right in its tracks.
That rifle still shoots straight.
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