Winchester 21

The Winchester 21 is Ben Givens’s father’s side-by-side shotgun and a practical heirloom whose meaning changes as Ben prepares for a hunting trip he intends to be his last. Fitted to his body, preserved through years of use, and carried into the sagelands, it connects his childhood training with his adult identity as a hunter. Yet the gun also makes his planned suicide feel physically possible, turning a familiar tool into the focus of a crisis. In the field, it brings back skill and hesitation together: Ben shoots chukars with it, then recognizes that hunting and killing are not an adequate ending to his life.

Inheritance and Early Lessons

Ben takes the Winchester 21 from its case in his bedroom and examines it with the attention of someone who knows its construction. It is a side-by-side, choked for quail and chukars. Its comb drops an inch and a half, a fit that suits Ben, while its original length of pull had been uncomfortable for him; he added two inches to the stock butt. The modifications record both inheritance and adaptation: the gun came from his father, but Ben made it his own.

The inherited weapon belongs to a longer history of lessons in hunting. When Ben was eight, his father took him to shoot mourning doves near the apple orchards. The birds flew up from the Columbia River to feed, and his father taught him to lead a moving target and swing the gun smoothly. Ben’s first shots that day were made with a .410 placed in his hands, not the Winchester 21. After he killed three doves, he buried their remains and ate the small amount of breast meat with regret. His mother disapproved of killing birds for pleasure, though she did not reject the boy: after watching him eat, she came to touch his cheek and then scrubbed the pan.

That divided lesson—technical instruction from his father, moral discomfort in his mother’s presence—shadows Ben’s later use of the Winchester. His father had taught him how to shoot without discussing hunting’s moral perplexity. The gun therefore carries a skill passed down without resolving the question of whether that skill should be used.

Handling, Preparation, and Threat

Before packing, Ben checks the barrels, works the safety, and inspects the bores. He shoulders the gun and tracks it along the picture molding, then presses the front trigger without firing. Rex responds by prancing. These familiar handling movements briefly make the shotgun an object of practiced control, but Ben also assesses whether he could use it to end his life. The realization frightens him. The gun’s ordinary function as a hunting tool has become entangled with a private plan to die.

Ben puts the Winchester down and packs with methodical care. For the hunt he gathers an upland vest, shooting gloves, a sling, a canvas cap, and twenty-five number 8 shells, along with maps, a compass, an altimeter, and equipment for camping and first aid. He later lengthens the apparent trip to six days by adding clothes and toiletries, making his preparations look consistent with an ordinary excursion. In fact, he intends to use the hunt as the setting for his suicide. The Winchester is central to that plan, though the neatly assembled equipment and carefully extended itinerary conceal his purpose from other people.

His plan is also set against a promise made with Rachel on a train from Mantua to Bressanone: their ashes would someday nourish intertwined red and white roses. Ben has preserved Rachel’s ashes in the hope that the promise might still be fulfilled. He fears that dying alone in the sagelands would make it impossible, and he worries that his dogs might be left without him. Against those attachments, the gun represents an intended finality that would cut off the future he had once imagined with Rachel.

The Gun in the Field

When Ben lays out his gear for the drifter, he aligns the Winchester’s lug with the hinge pin and snaps the barrels together. The drifter recognizes the model and admires it; Ben answers that he has had it forever. The exchange makes the gun’s age and continuity visible without turning it into a mere relic. It is still ready for use. Ben places twenty-three shells in the loops of his vest and keeps the remaining two in a pocket where he can reach them easily, then puts on his gloves and cap and carries the Winchester in the crook of his arm.

At the first chukars, he listens to their calls and uses the dogs’ movements to locate the birds. Tristan points, while Rex works the scent below the ridge. Ben holds the shotgun ready and prepares for the birds to flush, aware that the low sun may be in his eyes. When the chukars rise, he shoots one with the open barrel. A larger covey breaks cover; astonished, he swings through another bird and fires the second barrel, choked for a distant shot. That bird rises away wounded. The sequence brings his practiced handling into view, but it does not remove his unease about what the handling accomplishes.

Ben continues downhill. After missing once, he shoots more birds, including one that flies toward him along a steady line and another he takes on a later shot. He holds one chukar in his hand and studies its orderly markings and feathers, with the warmth of life still in it. He is surprised by how well he has shot using only one eye, and the success feels unjust to him: it seems like luck for him and bad luck for the birds. The Winchester’s reliability thus intensifies rather than settles his ambivalence. Its accuracy demonstrates competence, while the fallen birds make the consequences of that competence immediate.

Meaning and Change

Ben has long hesitated at the moment before shooting a bird. As a boy he felt regret; after the war, when killing had become part of his experience, he stopped hunting and fishing altogether. After Rachel’s death, he returned to killing as a substitute life, taking up bird hunting again in the previous two autumns. The Winchester accompanies that return to a childhood pastime, but it cannot make the pastime morally simple or emotionally sufficient.

After shooting, Ben finds the idea of dying alone in the sageland after killing small birds unfathomable. He judges the proposed ending inadequate to the life he has lived as a doctor, husband, and father, and recognizes that suicide itself is at odds with what he understands of himself and the world. The Winchester does not cause this recognition, but its double place in the episode sharpens it: the gun has served the plan to die and the act of hunting, while neither action offers the meaning Ben sought. By the end of this encounter, the inherited weapon is more than a sign of family tradition or a tool of skill. It embodies the unresolved tension between learned competence, the taking of life, and Ben’s dawning recognition that his chosen final act does not fit his life.