SEVERAL YEARS AGO, down in Colorado, I was prone behind one of my long-range competition guns, the scope’s crosshairs steady on the ribcage of an antelope feeding on a sage-covered hill nearly 500 yards away. This better work, I thought.
Before that moment, I’d had a pretty fixed notion of what made a proper big-game bullet. Whether I was chasing Coues deer in Mexico, bears in Alaska, plains game in Africa, or whitetails in the Midwest, I wanted my bullets to more or less behave the same. That is, to punch through hide and bone, mushroom on contact, and retain the majority of their weight as they penetrated.
If I were to rattle off all the bullets designed to meet these parameters, I’d run out of room in this column before completing the list. The point being, this view of what a hunting bullet is supposed to accomplish has been nearly universally shared by sportsmen and bullet-makers no matter whether the projectile in question had a lead core chemically bonded to the jacket, was extruded from a solid piece of copper or copper alloy, was topped with a polymer tip, or was formed using a basic cup-and-draw method that was common during your great-grandfather’s time.
However, in the last 12 years or so, a growing number of hunters began to challenge this orthodoxy. These long-range shooters were taking practical rifle accuracy to new extremes. They reasoned that if they could go 10 for 10 at 1,000 yards on steel targets the size of a deer’s vitals in shifting winds, wouldn’t a 500-yard poke on a mule deer amount to a chip shot?
For them, accuracy is paramount. And the only way to guarantee accuracy at long range is with match bullets.
HELL, NO
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October - November 2019-Ausgabe von Field & Stream.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October - November 2019-Ausgabe von Field & Stream.
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LIVING THE DREAM
After the author arrives in Maine’s fabled North Woods with a moose tag in his pocket, an adventure he’s been wanting to take his entire hunting life, reality sets in, and he learns a valuable lesson: Be careful what you wish for
Get the Drift
How to make an accurate windage call under pressure
First Sit
An icebreaker outing in a pristine spot produces the rut hunt of a lifetime
A Local Haunt
The author finds a sense of place in an overlooked creek, close to home
A Hop and a Pump
Jump-shooting rabbits with classic upland guns is about as good a time as you can have in the outdoors
Welcome TO camp
Is there any place better than a good hunting camp? It has everything: great food, games and pranks, and of course, hunting. Shoot, we don’t even mind going to camp for grueling work days in the summer. Here, our contributors share their favorite stories, traditions, and lessons learned from camps they’ve shared. So come on in and join us. The door’s open.
THE DEERSLAYERS
Before you even claim a bunk, you need to eyeball the hardware your buddies have brought. In the process, you’ll see that the guns at deer camp are changing. What was walnut and blued steel may now be Kevlar and carbon fiber. The 10 rifles featured here aren’t your father’s deer guns. They’re today’s new camp classics
THE JOURNEY TO PIKE'S PEAK
Last summer, the author and three friends ventured off the grid to a remote fish camp in Canada. They hoped for great fishing, but what they experienced was truly something else
Stage Directions
When early-season whitetails vanish from open feeding areas, follow this woods-edge ambush plan
Rookie Season
A pup’s first year, from preseason training to fall’s big show