~ Arming ~

Twenty minutes later, I was ready for whatever they were going to tell me and they were looking a doubtful.
“I don’t think those’ll work where we’re going.” Brock gestured with some distaste at the gun over my left shoulder.
I raised and eyebrow. “You ever shot a gun, Brock?”
The dwarf glared at me, finally shaking his head.
”Then how the hell would you know?”
He shrugged. I ignored him. The gun I’d chosen, an open-sight .300 cal Savage, was a family heirloom that my great-grandfather had bought the year of its making. My grandfather, who’d taught me to use my first gun when I was six, had an Alaskan grizzly pelt in his guest bedroom that this gun had taken. The stock was solid hardwood with a stainless steel shoulder plate; the barrel was three and a half feet of blued steel.
Frankly, if the thing didn’t fire ‘where we were going’, I’d could do worse than just hitting things with it.
Bhuto seemed to have a different sort of problem with my other choice. “Do you not have a more… formidable hand-weapon, Sean?”
I readjusted my grib on my old ‘herding stick’, which I’d found in a barrel of similar tools in the machine shed. I’d cut it from an ash tree when I was thirteen and had used the four-foot club whenever I had to push one of our bulls into a new pasture on foot.
I could have explained, but I didn’t really feel as though it was my turn.
I motioned towards the trees behind the house. “Let’s just go.”