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My shotgun
My grandfather´s shotgun is a 12. Gauge side by side Browning that has 26 inches of barrel , it was the first shotgun he ever owned and basically the one that started the hunting tradition that now runs through my family. It was one of the last shotguns made in the Belgium browning factory which some say , is the factory that made the best browning shotguns in that time.
It travelled with him in all of the hunting trips he had , it did not matter if whether it was raining or snowing , my grandfather said he could rarely recall any occasions in which the gun failed. I´m pretty sure they were made to endure all types of weather , but the fact that it almost never failed had a lot to do with the special care that my grandfather always had with that specific shotgun , people who went hunting with him say that almost every time he would take it out of it´s case , he would brag about how clean it was , and ask someone to look through the barrel so that he could tell everyone else.
Although that type of shotgun has been losing popularity through time , my dad was the one who had it after my grandfather , and he appreciates and takes care of it almost as good as my grandfather used to . This probably is because one of the best stories about that shotgun is a hunting trip that involves my dad and it happened around 40 years ago. He went out in the morning so that he could hunt a turkey , but little did he know that he would kill a turkey with brown feathers , which is called great turkey , the spotting if this type of turkey in the wild is so rare , that no one has ever killed another one like that in that ranch since my dad did, and it was the very first time that my dad made a shot with that shotgun.
My father has acquired other shotguns as he has been rolling in deeper in the hunting theme, and in order to be able to buy more guns he waited so that I could turn 18 and he could give me that shotgun , he probably thought that I would just throw it in the closet and rarely use it , but I think it is the most amusing shotgun that I have , and since it´s mechanism is so simple it makes it really easy to clean , which makes me like it even more.
I believe that it is not the same shotgun that it once was , but instead of looking it as a gun to hunt , I look at it more as something that made the type of live that I have , and that I wouldn´t change it for anything. I hope , as my dad already did , to give it to my oldest son and continue with the hunting tradition that my grandfather started.
