A K.C. Hunt–Engraved Rigby .470 Nitro Express:

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Three Cape buffalo stand in open grass: an old bull square in the middle of it, head raised beneath the great sweep of his horns, a second at his flank, a third just breaking the surface of the grass. Behind them a mountain holds down the horizon. Nothing moves. The country belongs to them.

Turn the rifle in your hands and they are gone, and there are lions. A lioness stands in front, head lowered, watching something past the edge of the world. The male rises behind her, taller, mouth open, looking the same way. A single small tree, a plain running out to a low horizon, and nothing else.

Turn it again — onto its back, the way a rifle in a rack or a photograph is never seen — and two bull elephants come head-on through dry grass, trunks down, tusks carried forward. They are close, and they keep coming.

Go back to the lions and you find what she was watching. It is on the other side of the rifle. Between the two locks lies the whole width of an action, and the engraver cut an eye-line straight through it.

All of it fits in the span of your two hands, in dots and lines almost too fine for the unaided eye. The rifle is a John Rigby and Company best sidelock ejector in four-seventy Nitro Express, proofed in London in nineteen eighty-two and completed in nineteen eighty-four. Beneath the buffalo, and again beneath the lions, in script you need good light to read: K.C. Hunt — a man who learned his trade in a Soho workshop from engravers trained in the reign of Victoria, and who worked past midnight to finish things. And while this rifle was on the bench, the house that built it — a house begun in Dublin in seventeen seventy-five — was passing into new hands.

What follows is that rifle, scene by scene.