Lebel 1886 Aperture
LEBEL 1886 APERTURE. (See also, LEBEL 1886) The Lebel 1886 Aperture differed from the base model with an affixed aperture sight. This sight, composed of a small disk, was preferred as it allowed for more precision at medium ranges. It's supposed that much of the benefit of this sight is rather psychological, allowing the shooter to better visually isolate their target.
Interview with Fenella Cleve
Interviewer: AHA member
Date: Redacted
Typewritten, questions omitted (...), 8.5in x 11in
1/3
In my early childhood, I remember the woods that grew tall all round DeSalle. They were impenetrable old growth that had stood since before the founding of our nation. They all went when the lumber yards and sawmills came. The new industry sprawled out, its chutes and rails stretching out to waterways and thoroughfares like roots, anchoring its trunk, the mill itself. The cavernous building rumbling with the whirring of saws and belched black smoke from its rickety chimneys.
We never were allowed to play near the log stacks. They fascinated us. Where once the trees had grown tall and towered over us, here they were subdued and orderly, arranged perfectly to be climbed on, claimed as our own as soon as the dusty workmen left for the day. As the sun waned, they cast long shadows, standing atop them you'd see yourself stretched out a hundred foot tall.
The bayou was dangerous at the best of times. But the stacks, despite their intimation that the wild had been tamed, harbored the perfect nesting holes for snakes and scorpions. But that wasn't why our parents had sworn us off them. There was a story which we all knew of the three Bisset boys who'd been playing near one when the bottom log had given away, and an avalanche of logs had tumbled down and crushed them. We retold the story in hushed tones whenever we passed Bisset's Farrier, rich with sounds of cracking bones and squelching skulls
It was that story which came to mind years later: my first return to DeSalle. A pack of grunts shambling downhill of one of the tallest stacks. With my sighted Lebel, deathly accurate at range, I took aim at one of the stakes holding the logs in place and fired. With a heave and groan, they tumbled down, pitching the grunts here and there like bowling pins. I wondered then if something had snapped inside of me, as I savored the destruction.
