Alpine rifle reaches the heights

Tom Cackett says the Haenel Jaeger 9 proves that good things come in small packages

- Tom Cackett

I have to remind myself occasionally that my job title does not incorporate professional deerstalker. More’s the pity. It also means that I have to fit my deerstalking in around my ‘nine to five’. This isn’t too hard in the summer when we are blessed with beautiful clear mornings and warm sunny evenings, but in the winter when daylight hours are precious it can be difficult. During these months, I end up deerstalking at first light before frantically trying to make it to the office for 9am.

Sometimes, when I’m really pushed for time, the rifle also comes with me to the office, which isn’t ideal, especially as I work in a city and even in a gunslip a rifle isn’t exactly inconspicuous. The solution to all my problems came late one evening when I was watching an Austrian chamois hunt on YouTube. The hunter was wearing a traditional Tyrolean hunting hat but that wasn’t what had caught my eye, it was the rifle he was using; it looked like a single-barrelled over-and-under shotgun fitted with a scope. The best bit came after the hunt when the hunter demonstrated that the rifle dismantled in exactly the same way as an over-and-under shotgun.