Ninety-five grains of Pyrodex, a Hornady Great Plains 425-grain bullet. I put away the ramrod and pinched a No. 11 percussion cap then squeezed it under the hammer.

This Lyman Trade Rifle, bored to 54-caliber, was based on guns built by Henry and Leman in the early 1800s, brought West and put to use by trappers and Indians for game big and small.

Here, on a windswept plain, such guns were carried by frontiersman and explorers like Fremont, Carson and Fitzpatrick, who passed in the early 1840s. Perhaps it was a day like this when they saw the valley.

“How did that place come to be called Winter Ridge?” 14-year-old Sam King asked. “And why do they call it Summer Lake?”

John C. Fremont, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Billy Chinook and company rode through Picture Rock Pass and made camp. It was December 16, 1843.

“At our feet…more than a thousand feet below…we looked into a green prairie country, in which a beautiful lake, some twenty miles in length, was spread along the foot of the mountain … Shivering on snow three feet deep, and stiffening in a cold north wind, we exclaimed at once that the names of summer lake and winter ridge should be applied to these proximate places of such sudden and violent contrast.”

Two days after Christmas 2011, Winter Ridge was shrouded in snow. It was warmer on the plain.

Ahead of me, Molly, my 11-year-old beagle, worked out the trail. Russell Scott, of Lake in the Dunes, had assured me that there were enough long-eared lagamorphs on their property near Summer Lake that Molly would get some satisfaction.

We topped out on a low ridge while Molly’s nose divined the smells of cottontails and jack rabbits from the odors of field mice and sage. Trails were manifest in two inches of tracking snow.

A big jack with black tips on its ears legged it out of a patch of rabbit brush and streaked away, zigging and zagging through the sage. I cocked the rifle and swung, but held my fire. It hardly seemed worth loading the rifle again to waste a bullet on that gone rabbit.

For the moment, I was on the far left of our line, while Sam, his 17-year-old brother Nolan, and 15-year-old Paxton Eicher walked with their 20-gauges pointed to the sky. Russell Scott followed along behind.

Out of the corner of my eye, I sensed tension. Sam swung and fired and put a load of steel into the dirt behind a streak of jack rabbit, its ears laid back, its legs in motion, throwing snow with every step. Out in front of me now, it shifted into high gear, straight away and the rifle was at my cheek.

For an instant the rear notch, the front sight and the rabbit intersected.

That moment when the smoke hangs in the air between the hunter and the prey is a thing of the past in this era of smokeless powder. But it is an instant rare and fine when the hunter believes he has connected with his prey. Then the smoke drifts and the truth is laid bare. I had missed the hare.

There was a furrow where the bullet had tracked in the snow. And scarcely an inch away, a dirty footprint, a lucky rabbit’s foot long gone.

When next Molly gave cry, another rabbit leapt away. This time straight away in front of Sam. My gun was up, its big hammer eared back when Sam’s Remington spoke. The hare rolled a somersault and was still.

We pushed out to the end of the fence row and kicked up another jack that doubled back. Right behind it, Molly tried to push it out in front of Nolan, but he never saw it and neither did anyone else, until it crossed the trail in front of me. In two bounds it was gone.

Back at the cabin, Sam butchered his rabbit, like so many young men have done on these sagebrush flats for hundreds of years. Here, in the shadow of Winter Ridge, where Fremont and his men had hunted deer and ducks and, more than likely, jack rabbits for their supper.

Wherever our hunts take us in this land we call Oregon, we are never far from our past. If there is a long-barreled muzzleloader in the back of your gun closet, dust it off and stoke it with powder and ball. A walk through the sage and along the tops of the rimrock is a walk back in time.