Another story from Russian Hunting Magazine.

A Different Order of Things.

By Mikhail Krechmar.

Published in December 2016 issue, photos by the author.

Condensed translation into English by me. 

 

It’s not very pleasant to sleep over a stream of running water bubbling under the truck. It’s even less pleasant to wake up knowing that you’re going to spend the next few hours toiling knee deep in a mixture of moss and mud, to set the vehicle free. Still, there was no way out of it. You are the only rescue team you’ll get, this is what Siberians learn with their first breath.

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MP-155 For Southpaws.

Baikal may not be too quick with introducing the promised novelties – I have yet to see even MP27 with a plastic stock in the store, to say nothing of the inertia-operated MP156. But at least MP-155 for left-handed shooters is available in stores, with a choice of wood or black plastic stock.

Russian Gun FAQ.

In preparation for my wild boar hunt, I decided to equip my old go-to Izh-58 with a red-glow sight. This allowed me to get an empirical answer to one of the most frequently asked questions about Russian hunting shotguns: is the front sight screwed in?

And the answer is…

A Bit of History: St. Trifon’s Day.

Photo (c) http://www.pravmir.ru

On February 14th, Russian Orthodox Chirch celebrates the day of Saint Trifon.

According to the canonic story, one of the falconers in the hunt of Ivan the Terrible was called Trifon. During one of the hunts, Trifon somehow let escape an especially valuable falcon, and had to recover the bird or face one of the punishments that were the reason why Ivan IV got his moniker. After three days of fruitless search, Trifon fell asleep under a tree, having made his prayers first. Then his patron saint appeared to him in a dream, as a youth on a white horse with a falcon on his hand, and told him to take the bird and return to the Czar. When Trifon avoke, he saw the falcon perched on the tree under which he was lying. The Czar gave Trifon a generous reward for recovering the bird, and Trifon in turn used the reward to put up a chapel dedicated to St. Trifon on the place where he found the falcon (the extended version of the story has it that the falcon was found at the estate of a Boyar, whose daughter Trifon eventually married). St. Trifon has since been honored in Russia as patron saint for hunters and fishers.

Social Realism in Gun Design.

Guns from the collection of Izhevsk Mechanical Plant (Baikal), finished by students of Leonard Vassev School of Gunmaking Excellence. Photos by Mikhail Krechmar.

Hunting Photo Flashmob

The new flashmob on Facebook that encourages hunters to post their hunting photos may actually fuel up anti-hunting sentiment.

You log on your Facebook account, click on the red number that flashes up against the little Earth image, and read “So-and-so tagged you in the post”. You know So-and-so to be a fellow hunter, so you click on the post, and see a hunting picture and a request for you to post one, too – to “flood Facebook with hunting pictures instead of junk“. You pick up one of yours, and past it on, tagging another hunting buddy… nothing wrong with it, right?

So much for not asking directions.

“I told you we had to go straight to that island, not turn right!”

Dmitry Dorofeev, my LJ pal and fellow Russian Hunting Magazine writer, reports a Great Knot sighting in the Persian Gulf. O.K, so what? So that the bird got that yellow band in Kamchatka, some 8,300 km as the crow flies. And a Great Knot ain’t no crow, besides, there are the Hymalayas on the straight course – the birds must have been going along the Pacific, and then the Indian coasts, some 13,000 km of flapping one’s wings to spend the non-breeding season in the warm.

Insignificant as it may seem, this sighting marks a real scientific discovery – this. population of Great Knots has been recorded in the Persian Gulf for many years, but nobody was sure where they came from. Now they do. Normally these birds winter in Australia, but one flock leader must have failed to ask for directions and took a wrong turn once.