Read an Excerpt:

From What Next You Bastard

Ken Hall and Monika McFerran

[James’] one great love was shooting. He had his own .22 semi-automatic rifle, an army issue .303 and a .22 Hornet. I bought the Hornet from him for £7 and we spent every spare moment we had shooting.

James and I decided that it would be handy to have a pistol, so that we could shoot while out riding— whenever we saw dingoes or wild pigs, we would be able to ride right up to them and shoot them from the saddle. So James bought an old single .22 rifle from Mr Wilkinson and cut it down to nine inches. It would have to do.

Next time I was sent to check a paddock, I took the ‘pistol’ with me. A feral cat was running along the track in front of me, so I urged my horse into a gallop, took the pistol out and loaded it on the run. As I came closer to the cat, I leaned over the horse’s shoulder and fired. Four things happened all at once: there was an almighty explosion; the cat flew into the bush unharmed (I think); I flew backwards out of the saddle; and my horse bolted all the way home without me.

James just about killed himself laughing when I told him.

Next on the list was his .22 semi-automatic rifle. We discovered that by ‘sweating’ a piece of nail onto the trigger-adjustment screw, we had a fully automatic rifle. There was one slight problem, though— its magazine only held ten rounds. To improve on this we joined four magazines together and put it to the test. Our target was a big old sow, sleeping under a tree. James line up the sights and pulled the trigger. That pig never had time to blink an eyelid before collecting the better part of forty bullets in her hide. This exercise revealed that we had another problem to deal with: once the trigger was pulled, you couldn’t stop it from firing until all the bullets were gone. This was very expensive shooting! Back to the drawing board.

We worked on the .303 next, cutting it down until we were left with a twelve-inch barrel. At nine o’clock one night the job was finished and James and I decided to check the results. There was no one in the bunk-house, as Rod and the four extra workers that Mr Wilkinson had hired were all up at the main house, playing cards in the kitchen. We knew that nobody would be worried by the sound of a gunshot— it was a common enough event on a property like this one. We turned off the carbide lights and it was pitch black outside. James poked the sawn-off rifle out the window and squeezed the trigger.

The blast was deafening.

‘I’m dead! I’ve been shot!’

One of the workers had been sitting right outside our window. His hair was smouldering from the long flame that had sprung from the rifle barrel and he was now jumping up and down and howling. James dropped the rifle onto the floor like a hot potato and we watched him run off into the darkness, like a human torch.

Our ears were ringing with t high-pitched noise, but when we had recovered enough to follow, we found the man sitting in the shower with water pouring down over his fully clothed body. He was still shaking with fright, but apart from having a new hairstyle didn’t look too badly hurt, He had lost at cards and had come back to the bunkhouse for a quiet smoke! He got a lot more than he had bargained for.