What lotus said reminded me of my Grandmother. After my Grandfather died she stayed on the farm by herself. With no one else there things got pretty quite. In the evenings she would sit in the porch swing and read. The whitetail got so used to her that they would come out of the woods and brouse the shrubs around the house. Pretty soon one would start getting too close to her flowers. She would softly shoo them away. In a little while they would be back, she would shoo them away again. Eventually they would not shoo, one would reach out and take a bite. BOOM, the old lady would pull out her .38 and shoot it dead. She would then go inside and call the neighbor to come and get the deer.
I went back there on vacation and wanted to hunt so I went up their, I stopped in at the neighbors and asked where he hunted so I would not encroch on him. He told me since my Grandfather had passed, my Grandmother was keeping him in more venison than he could eat. He even gave me some to take home, just in case I did not see anything that day. I decided to spend the night with her and that evening after dinner she shot another one while we sat on the porch. It was so strange to see my little 70 some Grandmother pull out a Smith&Wesson and shoot it. Never knew she had a hand gun, so she showed me her pistols. She had that Smith and an old Colt 45 Lightning that had been a weddeing present. She told me how when she was a younger woman, she could ride a horse at a full run, stand in the sturrips and shoot a pocket size whisky bottle off a fence post with that .45. The next day I again was at the neighbors house and was talking to him about her and her pistol. Cap told me a story about when she was a young woman, two men rode up to the house looking for my Grandfather. When she told them he was not there one of them said he was going to see for himself. My Grandmother told him NO but he got off his horse anyway. Now I understand why some of the roughest men in that country always treated her with reverance.
