I just remembered this story, from my youth when I was staying with my mate in his granny's cottage in Yorkshire. We visited his uncle, who lived at a nearby farm to show him my new Feinwerkbau Sport.

He took the rifle out of its slip and examined it doubtfully in the farmhouse kitchen. "So this is a spring gun? I used to have an old one of these as a boy. Where are the slugs?" I handed him a nearly full tin of RWS pointed pellets. He cocked and loaded it and walked to the open back door.

He squinted through the Diana no.10 telescopic sight (in Apel 1-piece mount) and taking aim at the rear end of one of his cows, which was grazing peacefully in the sunshine about 60 or 70 yards away, he fired.

You could hear the 'thwack' as the pellet made contact. The cow roared in pain, bucked its back legs in the air and took off, charging at full pelt around the field, greatly unsettling the rest of the herd.

The ashen-faced farmer handed the Sport back to me and I quickly put it back in the slip. I saw him several times again in later months and years but he never spoke of that day. It was as if the incident had never happened.