Marlin 62 levermatic. Dad saw it in a second hand consignment shop as a kid and scraped up the money to go get it. That would have been late 60s. Fast forward to late 90s and I’m 13 and hunting. Ammunition was scarce to put it mildly, and proper .257 60gr hollow points were exceedingly rare so factory loads could not be recreated, but a 60gr flat nose bullet would shoot almost to the same point of impact so we sighted in with reloads and I intended to hunt with factory loads. The reloads were important though. I had hunted before with my grandad who wouldn’t hand over his rifle but also wouldn’t shoot a deer, he would just watch them play. I then hunted with a .410 and slugs but never had a deer in range, so the agreement was that if I used the .256 then I had to make ammo. Dad had an old can of 2400, a couple boxes of bullets, and a lee loader. I made 100 rounds whackamole style.
Whack 1 pops spent primer
Whack 2 neck sizes
Whack 3 knocks the case out of the sizer.
Whack 4 seats a new primer
Whack 5 is whacking the powder dipper level
Whack 6 is seating the bullet.
Back to hunting... It’s my job to get my stuff ready the night before, including gun, ammo, clothes, and then to get up early enough to go. Of course as a 13 year old kid I forgot something important, the magazine for the rifle loaded with 4 factory rounds, but I did somehow manage to end up with a few loose reloads. Youth season opened with me and dad under a fallen maple at the edge of a narrow corn field. 1 cartridge in the gun, and a couple more in dads coat pocket for him to hand me if I needed them. It was raining or we would have been up on the fallen tree, but a raincoat draped over limbs shielded us both really well. So out stumbles a young buck sliding around in the mud and chewing up every remnant of corn he could find until I fired. The shot hit him well, and I quickly got the second cartridge in and took a shot as he panicked and ran around the field trying to decide where to go. The second shot also hit but in the neck. He ran across the field into a stand of woods surrounding an old cattle pond. The neck shot produced a easy blood trail to follow, and the chest shot was a good one too as it got the edge of the lung and heart. The buck was special, not only was he my first, but he was what we think to be a cross with some fallow deer that are in the area. He had a matched line of faint spots that ran from the top of his neck down his spine to midways and then the spots dropped down almost to his belly then went back up over his back legs.