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A Browning B25 Exhibition Set, Signed by Martens:
A Windmill in the Steel…
An Imagined Journey
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The wind comes up before the light does. You can hear the mill turning somewhere ahead of you in the grey, the long vanes ticking around on their tower, drawing water up into a tank that catches the first colour of the morning. The grass is dry and pale and waist-high, gone over to seed, and it holds the cold the way only autumn grass does. You walk into it, past a lone stand of trees, the light coming up slow and level across the open ground. Then a bird goes up — a dove, quick off the grass on whistling wings — and another behind it, and for a moment the whole still scene is in motion: wings against a pale sky, the mill turning, the morning arriving all at once.
It is a fine place. It is also about two inches wide, and it is made of steel.
What you have been standing in is the left side of a shotgun’s action: a hunting scene cut by hand into the bright flank of a Browning, the windmill and the water tank and the rising doves all rendered in line and shadow on a surface you could cover with your thumb. The gun is a Belgian gun, made at Herstal, in the old Liège gun country that has built fine arms for centuries. The field is an American one. How that prairie came to be living in that steel, and whose hand put it there, is the whole of the story — but it is worth saying at the outset that the gun gives you the field before it gives you anything else. That is the kind of gun it is.
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The specimen
Set down plainly, before it is dressed in any history: this is a Browning B25 Exhibition, a two-barrel set in 28 and 20 gauge, engraved and signed by Martens, and built at the FN/Browning Custom Shop in Herstal, Belgium, in 2005.
