.338 Marlin Express: Best Lever Ever, A new Demension in lever action versatility

If we’re honest with ourselves, the good old .30-30 Winchester will handle most shots most of us make on deer—and it’s proven itself on elk and bear all too often to question its efficiency. But we American hunters crave velocity and power. We probably don’t need as much as we crave, but in open country, life is simpler with cartridges that shoot flatter, and for game larger than deer, mor...

.416 Revolution: Obscurity to popularity…with lots of choices

Resurrected by Ruger and Federal in 1988, it’s an article of faith today that the .416 Rigby was one of the most popular of the British big bores. Historical records do not bear this out. Introduced in about 1911, the .416 Rigby was long held as a proprietary cartridge by the British firm of John Rigby. This means that they had a monopoly on both rifles and ammunition. The rifles were, more or l...

A Really Big Mule Deer

By the 1930s, virtually all big game species were at a low ebb in the United States, along-term decline accelerated by meat hunting during the Depression, and thedisastrous drought of the Dust Bowl. During summers from school in the late Thirties,my Dad wrangled horses in the Frazier Park area west of Denver, great elk and mule deer country today, and he doesn’t recall ever seeing a deer or elk ...

Africa's Toughest: Lord Derby's Giant Eland: Heat, Sweat, and Sometimes Tears

At the peak of the mid-afternoon heat, we took a break in the shade and drank some water. About six that morning, we’d picked up the tracks where we left them the night before. By now, I’d lost track of how many times we’d hit the herd, failed to get a shot, and had watched them break into their ground eating trot, vanishing in a cloud of dust. We were in northern Cameroon, and these were Ce...

Africa’s Whitetail, The Bushbuck: Lots of class, plenty of challenge!

Okay, so I didn’t really know what a “bushbuck” was the first time I went to Africa. Most hunters probably don’t. Obviously it’s some kind of buck that lives in thick bush, right? The bushbuck, Tragelaphus scriptus, is actually the smallest member of the group of spiral-horned antelope, and is very possibly the most widespread of all of Africa’s antelope. You’ll find bushbuck somew...

African Game Profile: Nile Crocodile

“Nile crocodile” makes a nice rhyme, but is actually a misnomer. Well, not exactly. There are Nile crocodiles in the Nile River, but there are also Nile crocodiles in the many hundreds of rivers, swamps, lakes and mudholes between Egypt and South Africa. Off to the west, there is another, much smaller crocodile, but throughout most of Africa, the big, green lizard is the Nile crocodile. And ye...

African Game Profile: The Greater Kudu Why the “Grey Ghost” is Africa’s most-sought trophy

The greater kudu is probably the second-most recognized of the hundred-plus African antelope. Thanks to Chevrolet, the much more common impala is probably the most recognizable, but there’s a big difference. If you’re hunting in an area where impala inhabit, you will probably take one, and he’ll give you a nice trophy—but the impala will be taken along the way, perhaps for camp meat,and ma...

America's Earliest Deer Season

As I write these lines, it’s a blistering August across the U.S. That’s not all bad. Winter and spring are behind us, summer is on the wane, and autumn is coming soon. For those among us who are deer hunters, that means our season is right around the corner…but that depends a whole lot on where you live. Along California’s Central Coast the “early” archery season is over, and rifle dee...

America's Favorite Cartridge in Africa: The great old .30-06 is perfect for plains game

Despite all the brave new magnums, the cartridge we know as the .30-06, properly “caliber .30, model of 1906,” remains America’s favorite hunting cartridge. In America, we may not think of the .30-06 as ideal for sheep, and probably not perfect for big bears. But, it will do these things and a whole lot more. It’s a great cartridge for most deer and elk hunting. It is fine for black bear, ...

America’s Tough One: Desert Sheep, It’s All in Getting the Tag

The two rams were feeding along a distant ridge when first spotted. They were two or more miles away, and I have no idea how our Mexican guides picked them up withquestionable optics. I certainly couldn’t see them! We moved down our own ridge, gaining a bit of ground, and I finally saw them through outfitter Kirk Kelso’s big spotting scope. One was insignificant, but the other had just the hin...

Awesome Ammo

I learned to handload centerfire at the same time I learned to shoot. The deal was that if I wanted to shoot, I also needed to reload. Since then, I’ve spent lots of time at the reloading bench. I always enjoyed it, but I don’t do it much anymore. Back then, if you wanted accurate ammo, you pretty much had to load it yourself. Back then, if you wanted particular bullets, anything beyond the �...

Bear Country

There was scat along the trails and long-clawed tracks in just about every wet spot. We were in bear country. More specifically, we were in grizzly country. At least one of the bears had marked a tree close by camp with deep scratch marks. Although I didn’t particularly want a bear to drop by for dinner, this wasn’t especially frightening. We were in the wilderness of western Canada, and there...

Chamois: The Smallest Goat: Don't Underestimate this one!

I’ve written before that all mountain hunting is somewhat similar, a matter of climbing, glassing, and figuring out how to get close enough for a shot. The difficulty always depends on local game density, the characteristics of a given mountain range, and ofcourse, your luck. I’ve also written that most of the world’s wild goats are more difficult quarry than most of the world’s wild sheep...

Classic Cartridge: .264 Winchester Magnum: Once a star, now almost forgotten—but still pretty cool

The .264 Winchester Magnum was introduced in 1958 and was Winchester’s second “belted magnum” cartridge based on the .375 H&H case cut down to .30-06 length. The first, the .458 Winchester Magnum, preceded it by two years. The second, the .338 Winchester Magnum, was introduced the same year. The fourth and last of the family, the .300 Winchester Magnum, came along in 1963. Of the four, the ....

Classic Cartridge: .270 Winchester, Jack O'Connor had it right!

Among middle-aged shooters like myself the .270 Winchester is best known as Jack O’Connor’s cartridge. Truly a man of letters, as a young man O’Connor wrote three pretty good novels, and he was a professor of English at the University of Arizona. But in our world he was the longtime Shooting Editor ofOutdoor Life magazine, and after his retirement he finished his career writing for Petersen�...

Classic Cartridge: .280 Remington

As standard cartridges go, the .280 Remington has one of the oddest histories. Based on the .30-06 case necked down to take a 7mm, or .284-inch bullet, the cartridge was introduced in 1957. It has never had enough sales to support an extensive variety of factory loads, yet those who use it generally swear by it. As a result, it is almost a cult cartridge, supported by a relatively small group who ...

Classic Cartridge: .300 H&H Magnum: No longer popular, but a long way from obsolete

I have been a fan of the fast .30-calibers for many years. There are few tools more versatile, or equally well suited to a wide variety of game and conditions. Of what we think of as “magnum .30s” I suppose I have used the .300 Weatherby Magnum the most, but I’ve used the .300 Winchester Magnum quite a bit, and I’ve at least dabbled with the full range of new .30-caliber magnums, includi...

Classic Cartridge: .300 Winchester Magnum, The cartridge for all seasons

Introduced in 1963, the .300 Winchester Magnum was the last of Winchester’s family of standard-length belted magnums following the .458 Winchester Magnum (1956) and the .264 and .338 Winchester Magnums (1958). All were based on the .375 H&H case, shortened to (more or less) .30-06 length and necked to caliber. The .300 Winchester Magnum would become the most popular of all. In fact, it is the wo...

Classic Cartridge: .35 Whelen, Gain without Pain

It was 25 years ago, the fall of 1986, that I first used the .35 Whelen cartridge. Although it was just being added to Remington’s line as a factory cartridge, it was hardly new. As a wildcat it dates clear back to 1922. James Howe, of the New York custom firm of Griffin & Howe, has generally been credited with designing the cartridge and naming it after Colonel Townsend Whelen, the top gunwrite...

Classic Cartridge: .375 H&H, The ultimate jack-of-all trades

The concept of the "all around rifle" is both seductive and elusive. Seductive: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have just one rifle that would do everything? Elusive: Can one rifle and cartridge really be suitable for the entire world’s big game? To the former, an emphatic “Yes!” To the latter, a guarded “Maybe.” Usable sure, but the spectrum is too wide for any one cartridge to be ideal f...

Classic Cartridge: 7mm Remington Magnum

Roy Weatherby was a savvy gun guy. He was also a marketing genius and a true zealot who believed in his theories about high velocity and his own cartridges that produced them. In the postwar era, the belted cartridges that bore his name beganmaking serious inroads into the staid American firearms industry. He made the majors nervous, and they responded with their own cartridges bearing the suddenl...

Classic Cartridge: The .300 Weatherby Magnum

When I was new shooter in the 1960s, we were in a serious magnum craze, when all the new cartridges bore a “magnum” suffix, and we believed velocity was king. That seemed to die down a bit, but in recent years, we’ve seen a resurgence of magnum mania with a whole spate of long, short, super short, and “ultra” magnums promising new levels of performance.

The new cartridges all p...

Classic Cartridge: The 7mm Mauser- Mild, Effective, and going Strong since 1892

The buck was standing on the edge of the treeline, just his head and antlers visible. He wasn’t a monster, but from his head shape and antler mass, I knew he was an older buck—and my season was running out fast. I picked up the rifle, and through the scope I could see a small spot of shoulder through dry leaves. The rifle made its flat little crack and the buck lurched forward, running across ...

Getting Your Goat: Not the same as getting sheepish!

The Rocky Mountain goat ranks as one of North America’s most under-rated game animals. The wild sheep with which he shares much of his domain ,bighorns in the south, Dall and Stone sheep in the north, get most of the glory. I suppose this is because North America’s wild goat got cheated in the horn department, carrying short, thick, beautifully curved daggers rarely approaching a foot in lengt...

Great Game Animals: The Hump-Backed Bear

The bald eagle is America’s icon is without question a regal bird. Benjamin Franklin’s preference was the wild turkey, a choice that today’s turkey hunters would no doubt approve. Legend, or at least Hollywood, has it that Theodore Roosevelt thought the grizzly bear was a better choice. True or not, I vote with Teddy! To me, the grizzly bear is the ultimate symbol of the American wilderness ...

Hog Nation: American hunters have gotten piggish, ain’t it great?

Leupold has a “Pigman” riflescope. Winchester has their new “Razorback” ammunition, and I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg. The wild hog is coming on fast as one of American hunters’ favorite pursuits.

The wild hog is not native to North America and is certainly not new. Some populations were established by 17th Century seafarers (if not sooner) so passing ships migh...

Ibex: The poor man's mountain hunt

Nearly 90 years ago Theodore Roosevelt’s son, Kermit, journeyed to the Tien Shan Mountains of western China. His book, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, is a legacy of adventure only slightly less rich than the great literary legacy left by his slightly more famous father. From a hunting standpoint, that Roosevelt expedition is fascinating because the primary and most prized quarry was the ibex...

Let’s go Pig Hunting

My 15-year-old cheerleader daughter, Caroline, has been going to the range with me for several years, and she did her hunter safety course quite a while back…but she hasn’t really expressed much interest in actually going hunting. So I was pretty surprised when, just the other day, she announced that she’d like to give it a try. It was spring break, so we made a couple of trips to the range ...

Marco Polo's Argali: King of the Wild Sheep

The year was probably 1272 when Venetian traveler Marco Polo first encountered the wild sheep with the fantastically curling horns that more than 700 years later still bears his name. This meeting almost certainly took place in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, a range of high valleys and rocky ridges that lead from present-day Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan into western China. For Mar...

More Whitetail Lessons

Some time back I used this space to discuss off-season scouting and some of the other preparations intended to make deer season as successful as possible. In Kansas, our rifle deer season is just 12 days, so it may seem like putting the cart before the horse to invest lots of time in food plots, stand preparation, and all the rest for such a short season. On the other hand, when the season is that...

My Favorite (NEW) Magnum: Of them all, the .270 WSM is the one I like best

I grew up in what we used to call the magnum craze, the late 1950s and on through the 60s when every new cartridge wore a belt and was called a “magnum.” Some were flops, but this era produced some of our most popular cartridges, including the 7mm Remington Magnum and .300 Winchester Magnum. Starting in about 1998, I think we went into a second magnum craze. In a brief period, we have seen fou...

Notes on Choosing Scopes: One size doesn’t fit all, so choose wisely.

I started hunting in the 1960s. At that time, the telescopic sight was more than a century old, but only fairly recently had come into widespread use. The variable-power scopes we take for granted today were still a bit finicky, so fixed-power scopes were almost universal. The most popular was the fixed 4X, and that was the scope I used clear through the mid-1970s. By then, the variable-power scop...

Optical Sight Options: When is a scope not a scope?

Among American hunters, open sights are almost obsolete. As I’ve written before, I genuinely believe they have their purposes, but they are very limited. It’s axiomatic that you can’t hit something if you can’t see it, and telescopic sights, rifle scopes, enable you to see better. Telescopic rifle sights have been in common use since the 1950s, and almost universal during my entire hunting...

Prairie Mule Deer:

My native state of Kansas pretty much defines prairie, especially if you aren’t from there! When I was a kid growing up in the hedgerows and woodlots of eastern Kansas, mule deer country was a long ways away. It still is, but back then it was an article of faith that in order to hunt mule deer, you needed to headed west to the tall Rockies, and probably cross the Continental Divide.

I ...

Red Stag: A Universal Deer?

The red deer native to Europe isn’t just a close cousin to our American elk. They are actually different subspecies of the same animal, Cervus elaphus, a round-antlered deer with multi-tined animals that, in many races, naturally circles the globe in the Northern Hemisphere. If you start in western Europe and work your way eastward across Asia, these deer gradually become larger in the body and ...

Scope Reticles

Okay, the word is actually “reticule.” You won’t get the word “reticle” to come up on your spell-check. But over the years, in our little world, we’ve shortened it to “reticle.” Whatever you call it, it is the arrangement of aiming point or points that you see when you look through your riflescope.

Perhaps the most common is some form of “crosshair.” That word actuall...

Scopes or Iron Sights? Scopes are usually better…but Iron Sights Aren’t Dead

Ken Elliott and I had an argument regarding iron sights that ran for years. Ken, my long-time boss, believed strongly that a centerfire hunting rifle should wear iron sights in addition to a scope, preferably with detachable mounts. I never agreed. Only once in my hunting career have I removed a scope in favor of iron sights, but more about that later.

We see not just better, but also f...

Swamp Buffalo

There are really just two ways to hunt Africa’s Cape buffalo. Most common throughout my hunting career has been tracking. This is because most of my buffalo hunting has been done in relatively thick thornbush or open forest where, absent blind luck, there isn’t much choice but to find tracks and follow them. Tracking buffalo is a great and classic African hunt. You get to see the African track...

The African Lion

I am scared to death of lions. I’m cautious around buffalo, but I’m not afraid of them. Elephants have my undying respect, and anyone who isn’t scared half to death in the middle of a herd of cow elephants isan idiot. I’m not the least bit afraid of a leopard when he comes onto a bait, or on the few occasions when I’ve seen one slipping through the bush. Nor is there any reason to be afr...

The End of The Three Amigos?

Just 30 years ago, the white, or scimitar-horned oryx, roamed the desert of northern Chad in the thousands. His two buddies, the twist-horned addax and the large-bodied, short-horned dama gazelle were nowhere near as prolific, but they still occurred in very good numbers. When Libya invaded Chad, the Libyans machine-gunned the herds and trucked the meat back to Tripoli- very efficient. This was pr...

The Magnum .30 Caliber: Versatility Champions

America adopted her first .30-caliber military rifle, the Norwegian Krag in .30-40, in 1892. Our long-beloved .30-30 Winchester came out a couple of years later. After the turn of the century, we changed military horses, first to the original .30-03 and then to the matchless .30-06. Arthur Savage had his .303 Savage and later, his .300 Savage. Remington had, you guessed it, the .30 Remington. You ...

The Modern Sporting Rifle

Honestly, I’m not crazy about the term “modern sporting rifle.” On the other hand, it’s like fingernails on a blackboard when I hear semiautomatic sporting rifles described as “assault rifles.” Unless one has a Class III license for a fully automatic firearm, there is no such thing as a legal civilian-owned assault rifle. So while I deplore and abhor the misuse of any firearm, and like...

The Power of the Curl: So, just what is this thing about sheep hunting?

Many years ago, I invited my then boss to join me in one of my secret public land hot spots for wild hogs. I’ll never forget how he looked down his nose at me and sneered, “No thanks; I’m not much of pig hunter,” as if that was the lowest life form on Earth. This fellow was a widely experienced hunter whom I admired greatly…at least until that moment. You see, by his own description, he ...

The Ruger Compact Magnums: Packaging Plus Performance

The .375 Ruger is a very good cartridge and in several different ways. It performs a bit better than the great old .375 H&H, but it uses a shorter .30-06-length (2.5 inches) case, enabling it to be housed in shorter, more compact, and often less expensive actions. One could perhaps argue that we didn’t need more competition in the power/performance niche occupied by the .375 H&H.

Okay,...

Theres something about the 6.5mm

The 6.5mm, caliber .264, although never popular in the United States, has remained a European standby since the first military cartridges in that bullet diameter made their appearance in the early 1890s. I’m not generally reactionary by nature, but I’ve long had a soft spot for the 6.5mm. This is not altogether rational. As a kid in the 1960s, when magnums were in, I had a .264 Winchester Magn...

Turkey Season

I am not a serious turkey hunter, but you wouldn’t know it by the way I’ve spent the past few days in head to toe camouflage, and making a wide variety of strange noises with some odd-looking devices. I thought I was going to pull it off, too. Yesterday morning (not the end of the season, but the last day I could hunt), Mike Hagen and I set up overlooking a perfect little meadow on the edge of...

When the Rut Shuts Down

Our American deer rut at different times in different places. Perhaps the earliest rut I know is on California’s Central Coast, where I’ve hunted much of my adult life. The very weird deer season there opens in August, when it’s hot as blazes, and runs into the third week of September (which isn’t much cooler). Despite the heat and long daylight, most seasons catch serious rutting activity...

You Have To Apply: Our tag drawings work…if you stick with them!

In the late afternoon we picked up fresh tracks along a snow-covered ridge, big ski-like tracks of a full-grown moose…but not big enough to be a mature bull. It could have been a youngster, but more likely a big cow. If so that was just fine. The rut was on, and she might lead us to a bull. A mile down the trail she did exactly that, and after a half-hour of playing cat and mouse in the thic...