“I was just thrilled,” Bearden said, “especially with the 9-pointer.”

At the time of that second hunt Bearden was on private land on the edge of Jackson County. “I can’t say much more about where I got it,” he noted apologetically. “The landowner allows me to hunt, but he doesn’t let many other people, and I know he doesn’t want a whole lot of other people asking him for permission to hunt.”

Bearden is one of those guys who can justly be called Renaissance men. In addition to being a very talented designer, small-arms craftsman and all-around fix-it man, he’s a painter -- that’s as in art, not barns: Murals that he’s painted grace the interior walls of his spacious home. He’s also a student of history, and well read, particularly with regard to air rifles and the role of those weapons.

“They go back to the 1700s and 1800s,” he noted. “A lot of people don’t know this, but Lewis and Clark had air rifles on their expedition to explore the American West. But the Lewis and Clark air rifles weren’t large enough to kill deer. There was an outfit of French soldiers who were outfitted with air rifles way back in history.”

One of the real highlights of putting this profile of the inventive hunter together was getting the chance actually to fire his creation. “You’re the first person other than myself to fire the air rifle,” Bearden noted at the time. “It seems funny to watch someone else shooting the rifle.”

For the amount of power that the rifle packs, there’s no recoil. The shot is louder than a small-caliber pellet rifle, but doesn’t make a great deal more noise. “I doubt you would hear it at 100 yards,” Bearden said. “It’s rather quiet for the damage it does.”

There was a louder pop when the bullet reached its target, but that could have been the projectile hitting Bearden’s tin barn on the other side of the target. “If you look at the barn, you’ll see a few holes in it,” Bearden admitted with a grin.

The relative lack of noise of the rifle can’t help but lead you to believe that it might be an ideal weapon of the future. It’s the sort of gun that could be ideal for deer hunting in urban and suburban settings, since it’s quiet, and has limited range. But Bearden isn’t too interested in exploiting the technology commercially.

“He’s like that,” said son-in-law Chris Sutton, himself a tinkerer building hot rods for a living. (He recently delivered one of his creations to former heavyweight boxing champ George Foreman.) “Ron has invented lots of things over the years that he could have made a fortune on, but he’s not interested in that.” Instead, Bearden is content with inventing firearms to satisfy himself. He doesn’t care whether he could market them and make money.

The air rifle is equipped with peep sights, but it also has quick-release-style mounts for a scope that can be put on and removed. Bearden had a scope on it when he went deer hunting with it last November.

The inventor has already had quite a few people ask him to build them an air rifle just like his, but he’s pretty sure that won’t happen. “I don’t think I would build another one for $1,000,” he mused.

With all the late-night work he put into the project and all the obstacles he overcame, it was a rewarding project. But getting the rifle just the way he wanted it scratched his creative itch; retracing that sleepless journey of discovery isn’t in itself appealing.

Some of the engineering drawings that he made during the design phase are framed in his workroom at his home. They hang next to framed 8-by-10-inch pictures of Bearden, this gun and the buck he downed with it.

His home-built air rifle will eventually go to his young grandson, as will the other custom firearms he has built. He’s taken deer with all of them.

“What means the most to me is that my grandson will own this gun one day and he’ll know that I built it with my own hands,” Bearden remarked. “He’ll look at the picture and know that his grandfather built that gun and killed a buck with it.”