My New Creed

Accepting the 6.5 Creedmoor craze one kick and scream at a time

- Will Brantley

MY BUDDY MILES IS A Colorado guide, and we’ve been hunting together for a decade. Good friends have rituals, and for the last bunch of years, come nightfall in hunting camp— whether that’s on the banks of the Tennessee River or on some Rocky Mountain slope—Miles and I would have us a little liquor, cuss, and speak ill of the 6.5 Creedmoor. We’d mostly point out that the 6.5, by God, is no .30/06. Then we’d build a fire so as to have something to poke with sticks and spit on.

Then one afternoon, Miles called me and explained with rehearsed diction that he’d become a pro staffer for a rifle company—and they wanted to send him a gun in 6.5 Creedmoor. When I asked if he intended to accept it, he became so defensive that I suspected he already had the gun in hand, and possibly sighted in too.

ROUND ONE

He brought the new rifle with him last winter for our annual Tennessee whitetail hunt and used it to drop a big 8- pointer in its tracks. As we were dragging the deer out, I told Miles it was a lucky one-shot kill, and had the deer run off, we’d have probably never recovered it.