By James C. Fulmer | Past President, NMLRA
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no less of enthusiasm.”
—Bear Grylls
The lock plate on Slusser’s rifle, and yes, that is gold.
The 2018-2019 hunting season was one of the best and most successful seasons I have had since I was in high school. It wasn’t about the amount of game I harvested, but about the time in the woods. I retired from working for a company on December 1st, 2017 and haven’t looked back. Why did I choose December? Here in Pennsylvania it is the beginning of the Whitetail Deer seasons. I regret, and will regret to my death bed, not retiring in October of 2017 so I could hunt all of the Pennsylvania small game season. The 2018-2019 season will be a season that I will remember.
The side plate on Slusser’s rifle is as pretty as the lock.
It started with my friend John Yeager. John and I both worked together at the same company on the 11PM to 7AM shift. We had the same love of hunting; we would leave work and hunt to noon or go home and sleep and then hunt. The third shift was a great shift if you like hunting. We hunted pheasant, ducks and deer together off and on; and John is a muzzle loading deer hunter. He loves hunting, but only uses the muzzleloader during the specific muzzle loading seasons. I had a great life on the “off” shift, but I finally let myself get talked into going day shift. That day shift, 7AM-3PM, ended my hunting. For four long years I would leave for work in the dark and arrive home from work in the dark during winter months and the Pennsylvania hunting season. John and I drifted apart, John still hunting during the day while I worked.
Left to right: cleaning jag, breech brush, breech scrapper.
I shot a doe during the early muzzle loading season and called him and bragged to him about it. John goes, “that’s right, you can hunt every day now that you are retired.” We hunted this fall and got a lot of pheasants. John, with the dog’s help, got eight pheasants for me this past season. That is the most I have shot in Pennsylvania on public land since I was a kid. Next year I plan on hunting for more pheasant.
Placing a piece of thick rubber over vent.
During the 2018 modern deer season I was also successful. This was followed by the Pennsylvania Flintlock Season. This season runs the day after Christmas until the third week in January. During this season you can only use flintlocks and iron sighted muzzleloaders. The flintlock was never an issue for me, but many times when I am “surprised” by a deer, I would shoot and then say to myself “where was my rear sight?” After 51 years of hunting, when using iron sights that is my biggest problem—not just covering the deer with the front sight and pulling the trigger.
This year’s Flintlock hunt was special, as I had the chance to hunt with outdoor writer Bill Heavey. He is the “Editor-at-Large” for Field & Stream magazine. Heavey also writes the back page of Field & Stream and is the author of several books. Other friends on this hunt were professional F&S photographer Randy Harris; gun builder Bill Slusser; hunt organizer and Editor of Muzzle Blasts, Dave Ehrig; and me. It was a great hunt, and I got to meet some great people. There will be many detailed stories about the hunt, but this story will only cover part of the event.
Bill Heavey has written several books, such as: If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What did I just eat?, It’s only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It, You’re Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck, and the one I bought: Should the Tent Be Burning Like That? As you can see Bill was nothing but fun to hunt with, and his books tell truer stories about what happens on hunts. Most of his stories don’t bask in a monster buck or the huge fish, they tell stories about hard work. The quote from “Bear Grylls” about failure and enthusiasm describes Bill Heavey perfectly. I asked Bill to sign my book, in which he wrote: “To Jim, Hope you have better luck than I do. Best, Bill Heavey 2018.”
Clamping rubber in place to seal the vent.
Hunters born in the 50s and 60s have found hunting a socially acceptable pastime. The group I was hunting with all fit in that age group. It is not that way now. When I was in school, everybody was talking about the deer they got, or how many squirrels, rabbits or pheasants they got after they got home from school the day before. Now fewer and fewer places to hunt and peer pressure are making it a lot harder for young hunters. As much as I love to hunt, I am worried for my grandchildren and my great grandchildren. That is if any hunting is still available.
There are a lot of statistics that need to be changed so that there is a future for hunting. It is like the movie “A Christmas Carol” where Scrooge was visited by the three ghosts. Think about your three ghosts if they were hunting with you: Hunts from the past, present, and future. The future of hunting is as grim as Scrooge’s ghost of the future. If you remember, he asked: “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of the things that may be only?”
One of the latest government statistics has American hunters 16 and older down 18% from two decades ago. The prediction that some people are making is that this will be a slow gradual slide downward and will get steeper after 2035. I will be 80 in 2025: how old will you be? We have to change our ways to be sure that the spirit of hunting as Scrooge shared in the spirit of Christmas doesn’t come to pass.
Bill Slusser, who is a muzzle loading gun builder, was also on this hunt. I watched Bill grow up in muzzle loading and building muzzleloaders. He built his first muzzleloader in1978 from a pre-carved stock. He went to Gunsmithing School right out of High School in 1980. He built guns and worked as a carpenter in the mid-80s to pay the bills until he was able to go full time in 1992. His favorite barrel is a gain twist Colerain Barrel which at 42 inches goes from a 1 turn in 96 to 1 turn in 48. This twist can shoot a round ball but works excellent on a saboted bullet. During this hunt we talked a lot about gain twist and he said he has been keeping records on the rifles he has built with gain twist since 2005. Shooting three-shot groups, he has had 21 rifles that shoot under an inch at 150 yards and 4 under 1 inch at 200 yards with the saboted bullet. I will say with my flintlock Dixie Jaeger using a saboted bullet I was able to get 4 inches at 200 yards and I felt I was doing well.
Cleaning patch is run up and down and pump the barrel clean.
Bill makes super fine custom rifles with gold inlays and steel engraving when they are ordered, but he is just as happy to make a hunting rifle. There are many, many, custom muzzle loading gun builders out there who started about the same time as Bill did – around the 1976 Bicentennial. Many custom muzzleloaders have been made during the same time period, and there is nothing like a custom muzzleloader. Everybody on this year’s hunt had a custom rifle except Bill Heavey. Nobody, including Bill, experienced a misfire with their rifles.
The biggest thing I saw that I liked was how Bill Slusser cleaned his rifle. I have tried every gadget and widget to make cleaning flintlock long rifles easier. Bill uses just a piece of rubber about an inch by a half inch, by about a quarter of an inch thick. Take the lock out, place over the touch hole and clamp with a spring clamp; you can buy at any hardware store for less than two bucks. Fill the barrel part way up with solvent, and Bill uses a breech plug brush as shown in the pictures to scrub the face of the breach. Then he takes a regular jag and pumps the solvent the length of the barrel a few times. Dump solvent out and take clamp off, a couple patches of oil and you are done.
When I did a lot of Revolutionary War re-enactments my unit would boil a tea pot full of water, plug the touchholes with a toothpick, and fill with the hot water. I do the same, except wood toothpicks fall out, do not seal right, or worse – swell and break. So that rubber looks pretty good to me; easier is better.
Our muzzle loading sport needs help in all the fields. Target shooting, rendezvousing, re-enacting, hunting, and gun building are all slowly seeing less and less participants. Only you can pass the spirit of muzzle loading on to the next generation and remove the Specter of Muzzle Loading Yet to Come.
