The first time I thought I was retiring (c. 1999), I fell into the company of an adventurous guy that had come and gone from my agency a couple times. Good deputy and great with people, but truth to tell just too free of a spirit to stay in one place for very long. He calls one day, saying he has something to show me, and wants to meet for lunch in San Bernardino; aight, low-risk if the sun is still up.
We meet at the Mexico Cafe (great food) and he goes on for some time about this adventure travel gig he was assembling that involved some Portland and Seattle techie/aerospace types trying to launch a fishing & hunting concession in Kamchatka, with an office in Vladivostok. He got hired to find guides, letting slip that bears on the fishing grounds were a complication. YA THINK? The rest of the spiel was interesting, complete with surplus Hind-D helicopters being used as transport to and from the sites. Yeah, Red Dawn Flyfishing, be sure and sign me up. NOT.
We finish lunch, and he takes me to his rental car and opens the trunk. He has a cased M-44 variant Mosin-Nagant he brought back with him from Russia--that was a lot less illegal to do in those pre-Homeland Security/pre-9/11 days than it would be now, I suppose. It was a nicely-done rework by a local Kamchatka gunsmith, rebored and re-chambered to 9.3 x 54R. Such carbines and rifles were pretty common in East Russia and the north slopes of Siberia, on through Finland per my lunch mate. He wanted to reload for it, and asked who made weird dies for such things; I told him that Huntington's, Redding, and CH4-D would be my first stops, and about two months later he was loading Speer 270 grainers into reformed Norma brass to feed the carbine.
!!!!!