WARNING: Spoilers spoken here.
2. Winchester .30-06 Rifle
Kate owns two weapons. One is a 12 gauge double barrel pump action shotgun, which is good for duck hunting and even better for repelling boarders. Nothing dissolves a close-range human threat like the mouth of a shotgun.
And nothing hunts better than a .30-06 rifle. It is ubiquitous in the Alaska Bush in a subsistence lifestyle. Every old fart has one, and eventually so do their heirs. The one pictured here was left to me by my father and I would guess is responsible for most of the moose I ate at his table and I’m betting virtually all the caribou. There was nothing my father loved more than sitting his family and friends down to a meal he’d killed and cooked himself. The caribou steaks sautéd in butter and finished in the oven in a wine sauce hold a particularly fond place in my memory. The recipe changed every time and it was divine every time.
(I won’t tell you about the time he made moose stew and didn’t realize until too late that the lid on the pepper shaker was loose. I learned a whole bunch of new words that night.)
But back to Kate. Like I said, she owns two weapons. Alert readers will notice that in twenty books she has never shot anyone with them. The closest she came to it was in A Fatal Thaw when Roger McAniff came roaring down the Park road on that snow machine. I’m hoping it’s the closest she’ll ever come, but you know how I am.
It is the weapon Lotte uses to kill Lisa. What we in the biz call “means,” which everyone in the Park has readily to hand.
Update on 2/2/23: My dad had a friend named Johnny Porter, who had a son named Gary, whom I’ve known all my life. A few years back Gary’s house was robbed, including of all his guns. He’s a hell of a hunter so we can’t have that, so I gave him Dad’s .30-06. He loves it; in his words it “shoots the shit out of everything.” My freezer agrees.
the 23rd Kate Shugak novel
coming April 11, 2023
order your signed hardcover here
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Chatter Kate Shugak The History of Kate Shugak in 22 Objects Uncategorized a fatal thaw A History of Kate Shugak in 21 Objects Kate Shugak No Fixed Line