50 - 60 years ago - when my father and his family started hunting, you took what you owned.

All my dad owned at the time was a .410 and all my grandfather owned was a .410 Bolt Action with a clip.

They traveled 50 miles one way just to get to the woods and then hunted all day and then came home - in a 1937 Chevy. No heater!

The whole town hunted in that section of woods and only the richest of them all had a center fire rifle and most of them were old army guns.

They shot lot's of deer with a .410 - and it shot just as good as some of the rifles of that time period. The 3 inch paper shells were of a very high quality and still shoot good today!

When I was about 12, my friend from school lived on a farm and rode the bus home with me after school. He went behind his house with his .410 and waited to see if he could see anything before it got dark outside.

Some people from my church lived on the next hill - about 4 miles away. They shot a buck at 9 AM in the morning and tracked it about 4 miles and shot at it several times, never knocking it down, but it was bleeding.

At 4:15 PM it made it's way down to my friends house and their land and when it walked by his treestand - he dropped it with one shot. It was a 10 point buck with 18 inch spread. Not bad for a kids first buck, not hunting all day like the big guys and not having a centerfire rifle.

My other friends who were tracking it couldn't do anything except congradulate him on his success. It was his land and his deer.

The other half of my grandpa's story was about a time when they went hunting with one of the other neighbors. They called him Mattea - which in Polish means mother. They were hunting rabbits with dogs and a rabbit ran past Mattea and he shot and sawed the rabbit in two.

You could imagine the look on Mattea's face. He was wondering what had happened to his rabbit. Nobody ever saw one that was all blown up like that from a 2 3/4 inch .410

Well back then, people didn't have different suits for hunting and when they went hunting they threw their shells into their pocket and went hunting.
Mattea never looked in his pocket before he went hunting and when he reached in for a shell - he grabbed a slug instead of a bb shot.

Now how many guys do you know of that could shoot a rabbit on the run with a .410 slug!

Definately a good gun in my book and an even better gun than a 12 gauge.