Carabina Remington calibro .22

The Carabina Remington calibro .22 begins as a gift and a lesson in careful handling, but becomes the Tiratore Scelto’s constant companion as his shooting turns from practice into a private, increasingly indiscriminate vocation. Its significance lies in that reversal: the rifle’s first use is framed by instruction and restraint, while its later appearances show skill and caution serving violence rather than preventing it.

Gift, training, and the father’s lesson

The Tiratore Scelto’s father gives him the carbine and teaches him to load and fire it safely, without haste. Before that instruction, the boy has spent considerable time practicing on stationary targets. His father distinguishes those targets from living, moving ones: before pulling the trigger, he must aim carefully and remember that a target he misses may return fire without mercy. The weapon is thus introduced together with a rule about consequence. Shooting is not merely a matter of hitting what is in front of the sights; it entails exposure to what the target might do in response.

The narrator says he keeps this advice close to his heart. That recollection gives the rifle a history beyond its mechanical function: it carries an inherited standard of composure and vigilance. Yet the advice contains a tension that grows more pronounced as the story continues. The father’s warning calls for care because a living target can answer violence. The son retains the caution, but later uses it not to refrain from shooting. Instead, it becomes part of his self-image as a disciplined marksman, one who believes that certain targets leave no second opportunity.

A companion on the move

The carbine accompanies the Tiratore Scelto as his shooting expands beyond fixed targets. He first searches for hawks on horseback, traveling farther from home as their numbers diminish nearby. Later, when old enough to drive, he sets out in his Ford van. The rifle’s place in this progression links training to an increasingly mobile pursuit: the boy no longer waits for a target to appear within a prepared practice ground but goes looking for living targets across a widening landscape.

During his wandering years, he drives with a rifle beside him, sometimes carrying two firearms: the carbine and a shotgun, both loaded and ready. The carbine is therefore part of an arrangement for constant readiness, not an object taken out only for a planned hunt. The narrator describes days or weeks spent roaming the prairie and desert, with no one supervising him after his father has died and his uncle has grown old and infirm. In that setting, the rifle travels with him through isolation, helping turn open country into an arena for the marksman’s search.

From marksmanship to violence

The rifle’s use becomes increasingly detached from hunting for food. The Tiratore Scelto says he shoots at birds, including hawks and crows, and sometimes at rabbits, deer, and other creatures, while insisting that he is not a hunter. He describes the challenge of firing at hawks that disappear against a hazy sky and reappear in view, and recalls bullets striking birds in flight. His attention falls on speed, visibility, aim, and the instant of impact. The living animal is treated as a test of skill; the carbine converts that test into a killing.

The most chilling extension of this practice is the shooting at passing vehicles in the Nevada desert. From the open window, he aims the carbine at a distant vehicle and calculates the combined speed of the two cars before firing at the right moment. He says he can remain composed as the target passes close enough for him to see the driver’s face, then watch in the rearview mirror as the vehicle swerves off the road. He claims that these actions arise from the instinct of the marksman rather than revenge. The father’s lesson about the danger of a living target has been inverted: here, the person in the vehicle is given no chance to answer or even to know that the shot has been taken.

The rifle’s changing meaning

The carbine binds the marksman’s self-conception to the violence he carries out. In the early memory, careful aim is a safeguard, and the possibility of return fire gives the lesson a human scale. Later, the same care becomes an instrument for selecting and striking targets without witnesses. The rifle does not itself explain the change, but its repeated presence makes the continuity visible: the trained boy and the roaming shooter share a weapon, a practiced steadiness, and a belief that precision can make violence controlled.

That belief is undercut by the consequences the narrator describes. The rifle can bring down a bird or send a passing vehicle off the road; the marksman’s control does not make those acts harmless. The carbine’s path from a father’s gift to a loaded firearm carried through empty country therefore records a moral transformation as well as a practical one. What began as instruction in responsible handling becomes part of a solitary code in which caution governs how to shoot, but no longer whether to shoot.