I finally shot a squirrel with a handgun.
In fact, I shot it at eight yards, with open sights, from the most blue collar single-action revolver made today – the Ruger Single-Six.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done with a firearm, and the most fun. That’s why I wanted to do this in the first place.
I wasn’t looking for a better way to kill squirrels because a scoped .22 rifle solved that problem a long time ago. I wanted to get good enough with a handgun to hunt squirrels responsibly, and then figure out whether I could actually get close enough to make it work.
It took a lot of practice, a good piece of squirrel woods, and, as it turned out, about ten minutes of doing absolutely nothing.
The primary handgun for this project is the Ruger Single-Six chambered in .22 Winchester Magnum rimfire. The Single-Six dates back to 1953 and is essentially Ruger’s rimfire take on the traditional single-action six-gun.
Ruger introduced the New Model Single-Six back in 1973 with its transfer bar safety system and over the years the revolver has been offered in several barrel lengths and configurations.
Many Single-Sixes are convertible models with separate cylinders for .22 Long Rifle and .22 Magnum. Mine was wearing the Magnum cylinder for this hunt.
Why? Mostly because all of my rimfire rifles are .22 Magnum and I wanted to keep things simple. It certainly wasn’t because I thought the extra few yards of effective range the Magnum rounds give me would matter here. At the distances I’m hunting squirrels with an open-sighted revolver, the limiting factor isn’t whether the cartridge can kill a squirrel. The limiting factor is whether I can put the bullet exactly where it needs to go.
But back to the Single-Six.
The revolver makes me work harder than a scoped rimfire pistol or rifle would. I have to manually cock the hammer for every shot, establish my grip, find the sights, and pull the trigger well.
The sight radius is short compared with a rifle, and a small error in sight alignment gets considerably less small by the time the bullet reaches the squirrel. There isn’t much technology helping me out and that’s a big part of why I enjoy it, and why this sort of old-school hunting resets your habits, thoughts, and processes as a hunter.
Why ten yards for a range limit?
Before I started carrying the Ruger for hunting, I needed to figure out how far I was actually willing to shoot it at a squirrel. That distance has nothing to do with how far a .22 Magnum can kill a rodent, because the cartridge has more capability than I currently do. It also doesn’t matter how accurately somebody else can shoot a Single-Six. When there’s a squirrel in front of me, the only groups that matter are mine.
After practicing with the Ruger, I settled on ten yards from a supported position as my current maximum hunting distance. That’s where I can consistently maintain what I’ve started calling MOS, or Minute of Squirrel. I’m not sure the shooting world was waiting for another unit of angular measurement, but now it has one.
Minute of squirrel is pretty simple. I need to be able to put my shots where they need to go consistently enough that I’m comfortable using that ability on a squirrel. If I can do it at ten yards ,but my groups start opening up at 15, then my hunting range is ten yards.
That isn’t a limitation of the Single-Six, and it certainly isn’t a limitation of the .22 Magnum. It’s my limitation. Pretending otherwise wouldn’t make me a better handgun hunter. It would make me irresponsible at best and an ass at worst.
I was hunting a private farm in Virginia and started working my way along a dry creek bed. It was exactly the sort of place I had been looking for earlier in this series. Mature hardwoods surrounded the creek, acorns covered the ground, squirrel sign was easy to find, and the creek bed offered plenty of cover for squirrels moving between feeding areas.
I moved slowly and tried to pick apart the woods, but eventually I realized I might be trying too hard to make something happen. Fred Bear gave hunters some pretty useful advice about situations like this: sit down and shut up.
I found a place where I could settle in, got comfortable enough to stay still, and gave the woods a chance to forget I was there.
It took about ten minutes before a squirrel started working the ground near me. That’s also when carrying the handgun changed the hunt. Had I been carrying a rifle, I probably would have already had a perfectly reasonable opportunity. With the Single-Six, seeing the squirrel wasn’t enough because I still needed him to close the distance.
That might be the part of handgun hunting I underestimated the most. Getting within rifle range of a squirrel isn’t very difficult in good habitat, but sitting still while a squirrel is almost within handgun range requires a different kind of patience. The temptation is to start negotiating with myself about what constitutes close enough.
I’d already decided that ten yards was my limit, though, and changing that number because there happened to be a squirrel standing a few yards beyond it would have made the limit meaningless. The revolver hadn’t suddenly become more accurate because there was fur in front of the sights, and I hadn’t suddenly become a better handgun shooter because I wanted the squirrel.
So I waited and let him keep working toward me. Eventually he moved inside my ten-yard limit and climbed onto a fallen tree. Then he did something squirrels aren’t particularly famous for doing when I need them to: he stopped moving long enough to give me the shot I wanted.
I had a solid position, the squirrel was stationary, and he was within the distance I had established through practice. I cocked the Single-Six, settled the open sights where I wanted them, and squeezed the trigger. The .22 Magnum cracked…and the squirrel was gone.
I thought I had missed.
There’s virtually no recoil from a 22 magnum in a Single-Six, but there’s certainly some pop (that’s what constitutes muzzle blast in the rimfire world), and I didn’t watch the squirrel react after I shot. I just knew he wasn’t where he was before , and he didn’t seem to run off.
I got up, walked over to the fallen tree and looked on the other side. Sure enough, there laid one dead squirrel. My first squirrel shot with a handgun.
I was pretty damn proud of that squirrel, but not because I had made a spectacular handgun shot. Actually, I was proud because I’d done exactly the opposite. I practiced enough to understand what I could reliably do with the Ruger revolver, established a conservative limit based on that practice, and waited until the squirrel gave me a shot comfortably inside that range.
Handgun hunting is forcing me to become more disciplined about the difference between what a firearm is capable of doing and what I’m capable of doing with it. Those aren’t always the same thing.
So what’s next? The obvious next step would be to make 15 yards my new limit, but killing one squirrel at ten yards hasn’t earned me another five yet. That will happen on the range. I’ll keep shooting the Single-Six from supported positions and spend some more time practicing from the positions I actually encounter in the woods instead of doing all my shooting from a comfortable bench. Knees are remarkably steady rests for handguns, just FYI.
When I started this project, I thought handgun hunting would mostly be about learning to shoot a handgun better. I’m beginning to realize that shooting is only half of it. The other half is learning to hunt well enough that I don’t need the squirrel to be 30 yards away because I can figure out how to get him inside ten.
On that Virginia farm, along a dry creek bed covered in acorns, I finally did.
Now I have to earn fifteen.