Going Off Half-Cocked

“Don’t go off half-cocked!”

Have you ever wondered what that means?

Elwood K was the old man who lived in a small self-made home behind our house when I was growing up. I never had a grandpa after I was four so I adopted him. Everyone knew him as “Swede” which was interesting since the name is Scottish and English. He was known by the white Popeye cap he always wore. His house was full of them. Taking his lead, I wear a black Army Ranger cap which my house is also full of. 

Swede was fond of four things: guns, Canadian Mist whiskey, both of which he had hidden all over his house, his yellow half ton Dodge Ram pickup and his mutt dog Digger Odell. Several times a week you could see his old Dodge driving ten miles under the speed limit using both sides of the road. Old Swede was returning from a trip to the liquor store to get his “medicine”. On the seat beside him would sit Digger, head and tongue hanging out the open window. Sometimes Digger was the designated passenger and sometimes he was the designated driver; it all depended on how Swede was feeling.

My mom bought Swede’s house and the small mother-in-law house next to it when he was in his 80s with the understanding that he could live in it rent free until he died. This gave Swede a bank full of new cash and a limited life span to use it so it was his goal to buy anything he desired which ended up stacked in his house to the point where there was only a narrow walkway to get from the back door to the back bedroom. If he saw something of interest in the Montgomery Ward catalog, he would buy it. He bought a 15’ x 25’ metal garage which lay boxed in his living room. A year later he forgot he bought it and he bought another one which also sat in the living room. He made weekly trips to the gun store and brought a new gun home each time. Upon cleaning out the house, guns were found in crawl spaces, attic rafters and hidden in the pockets of old jackets. 

Besides guns, Swede enjoyed a good stick of dynamite. It was an addiction he had from working as a logger in his youth. While living on the Olympic Peninsula in the small town of Home, he offered to blow up a large stump which was in the middle of the school’s new ball field. He packed dynamite around the roots, lit the fuse and ran. The resulting explosion lifted the stump high into the air and the concussion rolled across the cove, hit the far shore, came rumbling back and broke all the windows in the school. Just as in his youth he enjoyed blowing up stumps for friends in our neighborhood mainly for the fun of watching large immovable objects fly through the air. It was not unusual for him to have his red box with his blasting caps, dynamite and blasting machine behind the seat of the Dodge just in case he was needed. I made it a point to check before hopping into the truck to ride with him.

Swede was also an encyclopedia of information on hunting and fishing and in the evening when I saw his light on I would go to his house and we’d talk for hours on proper technique for stalking a bear or deer and how to hook a wily Dolly Varden. It was during a conversation on the best formation to set duck decoys that Swede went into his back bedroom and brought out an 1897 Winchester pump shotgun.

“Here,” he said. “It’s from me to you. Now go learn to be a hunter.”

And so I took my chest waders, a box of shells, the Winchester, a duck call, ten decoys, the Field and Stream manual for beginner hunters and I headed to the duck blinds of Lake Terrell. 

The model 1897 has a two position hammer. Pulling it back to the first click puts it into what they call “half-cock”. This position is the safety that Winchester created for the gun. If it is in half- cock, you can pull the trigger but it won’t release the hammer and fire. To fire the gun you must pull the hammer back to the second click. I was thinking about this as I sat in the blind getting soaked by freezing rain; a cup of hot coffee being pinched between my knees. “I wonder if I pull hard on the trigger on half-cock if it will hold?” Bad thought. With the barrel pointed into the air, I put the butt of the gun in my lap for leverage, put the hammer into the half-cock position and with my cup of coffee still between my knees pulled hard on the trigger.

“BOOM!” I don’t know about most Winchester 1897 shotguns and how their safeties work but the safety on this 1897 didn’t. The cup of hot coffee was now flying at my head, the result of a 12 gauge shell firing and the recoil of the gun butt punching me in the groin. Other hunters in nearby blinds may have mistakenly misinterpreted the quacking sound I was making as a very odd sounding duck call.

Back at home I went immediately to Swede’s house. He was highly medicated from Canadian Mist.

“The Winchester can be fired in the half-cock position!” I yelled.

“Why do you sound like a boy who has just inhaled the gas from a helium balloon?” he asked. “And no, it can’t be fired in the half-cock.”

“Well I’ll prove it. Come out onto the porch.” This was the second bad idea I had that day. He stood up swaying and grabbed his cane staggering to the back door. Digger followed close at his heels. He was so intoxicated that I was glad there weren’t any open flames nearby because if he accidentally burped, he might have exploded. I handed him the shotgun and stepped out onto the lawn. Swede put the hammer in the half-cock position and put his finger on the trigger. It was then that I realized that he was swinging the barrel around and it was aimed at my legs. I jumped.

“Boom!” The grass on the lawn three feet from my left leg flew into the air. Swede, who was not prepared for a 12 Gage shotgun to go off fell backwards over the top of Digger and landed with a thud on his back in the kitchen narrowly missing the still boxed metal garages.

“Well gall darn-it, I guess it can go off,” he muttered.

I learned a lot about hunting, fishing, camping and swearing from Swede in our years together but what I learned from him that none other could teach me was what it means to not go off half- cocked.

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