Climbing into the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia with a muzzleloader slung over my shoulder was a journey back in time. This was the gun that the colony’s first settlers used when they too trod the same ground 400 years ago to hunt deer and bear. It helped tame the state and then the entire country. As I pushed my way through undergrowth at the base of the mountain range by the light of the moon at 5am on a bitingly cold and bitter January morning, unseen branches and briars clawed at my face in the dark. This was the last day of the hunting season that had been extended – as hunting seasons across the US often are – for muzzleloaders. To keep this heritage weapon alive and to give the animals a sporting chance. For the deer population that had been shorn over the previous months at the hands of hunters with proper hunting rifles the finish line was in sight. Hunters with muzzleloaders are not rated as much of a threat: the guns are prone to misfiring, inaccurate if not loaded correctly and liable not to go off at all. And if you do get a shot off, the process of reloading is time-consuming. Stand the gun on its butt, measure and pour gunpowder down the barrel and use a ramrod to push in a projectile. By which time the deer or bear could be in Kentucky.But muzzleloaders are beloved by hunters with a sense of history. My hunting partner for the day Shane Townsend, who lent me one of his modern .50 calibre muzzleloaders, said that even though the gun is a “pain to load, a pain to clean, unpredictable and not particularly accurate,” he loves it.“The muzzleloader gives me more time in the woods, it makes hunting a little harder than it has to be, and it feels old in the best way. My favorite deer hunting of the year is slipping around the mountains on a gray, drizzly day with a........

© The Spectator