More years ago than I care to remember, I strode into a pawn shop and saw her behind the counter. She was long, lean and spare, but graceful, too. I could tell she’d been hurt, and she’d need to be carefully nursed back to health. And then we’d walk together, and maybe we’d get to know each other.

There was not a lot of money in my shotgun budget, but this baby was worth a chance at the $150 price tag.

No one had looked at the old shotgun, I guessed, for months. It was a 12-gauge Lefever Nitro Special, and on the rack it was in three pieces, its stock cracked and splintered at the action. Its owner had left it on consignment, and it had languished ever since.

In hand, the action was tight. It closed up solid and didn’t rattle. The next day, I laid three 50-dollar bills on the counter and took the gun home in a bag.

What I learned from a worn-out copy of Gun Digest was that Daniel Myron Lefever was best known as the inventor of the hammerless shotgun, introduced in 1878. Later, the Lefever Arms Company was incorporated with Ithaca Gun Company, and the Lefever name began to be associated with well-built, inexpensive shotguns.

My gun, as it turned out, was manufactured in 1936. It was probably purchased by a hunter on a budget — just like I was in 1993 when I rescued the double-barreled damsel in her distress.

We had two little girls then and money was tight, but as soon as there was a little extra, I took the old smoothbore to a gunsmith.

“It looks like someone left too much oil on her,” he said. “She sat on a rack, and the oil ran down into the stock, and then, after a few years of not being shot, the wood, weakened by the oil saturation, gave way in recoil. I bet it scared him!”

After two weeks, I went to pick up the Lefever. The smith had found a piece of walnut that matched the stock and sectioned out a piece, epoxied it back in, then used epoxy on the other side to put strength back on that side of the frame.

We moved to Central Oregon the next year, and my journal says I packed that shotgun on a chukar hunt north of Madras. My brother-in-law Shannon Winters and my friend Mike Tom joined me on a rimrock hunt for chukar. There was another day that year when I bagged one more chukar with the Lefever as well as assorted pests.

Years later, the Nitro Special was at my shoulder when I bagged my first limit of Canada geese in a Klamath marsh. Darren Roe shot a triple that day. I missed with both barrels, shook off my jitters and took two birds from the next flock — one with each barrel. I finished my limit with a third bird from the next flight.

As such things go, I flirted with other shotguns and in 1999 picked up a semi-auto Remington. I loaned the Lefever to friends on hunts, and one day someone shot it better than I. My friend Ron Burns broke something like 15 out of 15 clay pigeons, and as I looked at him with that rescued shotgun, I realized he shot it better than I did. We struck a deal, and he took it home.

To replace the Lefever, I carried pumps, autos and over/unders, and finally settled on a CZ Ringneck side-by-side in 20 gauge. I’d learned to shoot a double and wasn’t particularly good at any particular style, but I found my shooting passable when birds were in the air.

I always missed the old gun. We had history together. Ten years later, Burns brought the Lefever back to me.

There’s something about old guns. This one still has most of its bluing. Whoever owned it before me had loved it so much they had over-oiled it, loved it too much. It was hard to blame them. And the gun, built in New York during the Great Depression, still functions as it did when it was new.

Something in me rejects the thought of owning a gun just for the sake of owning it, and I’ve made it a point to carry the Lefever in the field at least once a year since.

On an October day after my deer tag was tied on a buck, I loaded my pup into the truck and drove down to Lake in the Dunes, where my friend Russ Scott was waiting.

Russ looked at my ancient shotgun and my pudelpointer pup — one with perhaps too much experience, and the other with not very much — and he didn’t say much except, “Let’s go take a walk,” and that, I think, is what an old gun wants.

— Gary Lewis is the host of “Frontier Unlimited TV” and author of “John Nosler — Going Ballistic,” “A Bear Hunter’s Guide to the Universe,” “Hunting Oregon” and other titles. Contact Lewis at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.