A truly old school beauty!

It's the kind of rifle you and Mark would especially appreciate. It has lots of personality and looks just like what it is, a competent old rifle in very good condition that has been well treated its whole life.

It's previous owner, on the other hand, was not just what he looked like. He dressed and conducted himself very much like a quiet Montana dirt farmer but was a very competent gunsmith, gun collector and a good shot judging by the small target bullseyes he attached to each gun stock at gun shows to show what the rifle was capable of. During my visit I learned he was one of the partners of a group who bought out High Standard back in the day and I got a tour of his climate-controlled concrete gun bunker. Inside, the peg boarded walls held at least one example of every .22 pistol model that High Standard had built, hundreds of them, along with a similar display of the company's .22 rifles. There was also a wall full of semi-auto Winchester .22 rifles including some I had never seen.

The trip was also enlightening to me as a hunter. I learned that Freezeout Lake (west and a bit north of Great Falls, about an hour and a half's drive from my Montana cabin) is on a main north/south waterfowl flyway and is a stopping point for millions of ducks and geese every year. I don't particularly like to eat ducks and geese so I never really got into hunting them. However, there is a sort of preserve around the lake that holds a lot of pheasants and I was a pheasant hunter my whole shooting life. My last hunting dog and I ended up walking many miles around that lake.