.22 Winchester Magnum Rimfire

Shooting Revolvers

- Dick Williams

Memories of Dick's early handgun hunting career always include a Ruger Single Six with a pocketknife.

It isn't the diversity in hunting interests that has surprised me over the years. Rather, it's the passions developed by the different groups of hunters for the hardware associated with their preferred trips afield. Bird hunters focus on and acquire some exotic models of shotguns. Big-game hunters engage in emotional discussions as to what's the "best ever" bolt-action rifle. Although big-game handgun hunting is a more recent endeavor, the process is the same.

The Colt New Frontier Scout with the magnum cylinder installed and a box of Winchester 34-grain JHPS will do things that just might surprise a shooter.

My first "serious" hunting handgun was a Ruger Single Six acquired in 1957. Just about anything that wasn't a protected species and weighed no more than a couple of pounds was fair game, whether it walked, crawled or flew. By the time I reached my thirties, I had gone through a few .357 Magnums, working my way up to the pursuit of bigger game with the big-bore revolvers. In my late forties, I began writing and started looking at the super big-bore handguns for hunts in Alaska, Africa and Australia. As more time passed and my enthusiasm for climbing mountains, following Cape buffalo herds and prowling the vast tundra of Alaska decreased, so did my tolerance for recoil, and I started working my way back down to medium-caliber centerfire cartridges and rimfires. But as a dedicated handgun hunter, I was still interested in the enhanced terminal ballistics delivered by "magnums." When I got all the way back down to rimfires, I became fascinated with the .22 Magnum.