Thread: Hunting traditions elsewhere in the world

Originally Posted by MarkN

When I was in South East Asia, I came across two hunters in the Limestone Karst mountains, on part of the Viet Nam/Laos border.

They had guns, that to my untrained eye, were flintlocks, with barrels about 6 feet long, longer than they were tall.

They let me look at their harvest, a giant flying squirrel that was the size of a cat. Beautiful red, russet, black and cream fur.

But about as much meat as a rabbit. Skinny thing.

Yep, in the late 1990's I was in the back blocks of Laos and saw those. Was able to approach them and have a good look at them. All pure home made caplocks made from heavy walled water pipe. Some door handle architecture fashioned into a spring and trigger, wooden stock, lots of string to bind them together, cap gun caps used to initiate. Black powder home made, even to the extent of extracting the Pot Nitrate from the dirt underneath a pile of old animal carcass bits (put aside for just such a task). Shot for the monkeys @25m was just road gravel held in place with paper. It worked is all you can say. These guys were skinny as a rake, and protein was hard to come by in those mountains. So illegal or not, when needs must people can build guns to keep themselves fed, no matter how draconian the Govt.