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Rifle Loony NewsVolume 5 Issue 3 November 2013

John Barsness & Eileen Clarke www.riflesandrecipes.com

What’s Up?Good JointsEC It’s that time of the season when the alarm goes off and I just want to roll over and go back to sleep. The floor is going to be cold under my feet, and the furnace won’t warm the chill off the house before it’s time to slip on my orange vest and go hunting. But another voice is telling me: Stay in bed, sweet-heart, and you’re nothing but a lazy bum. It’s Friday. Tomor-row all the people who work 9 to 5 are going to be out there, too. This is the time. The deer are starting to get rutty, the wind’s not roaring, that storm the weather people predicted hasn’t materialized and about then the snooze alarm times out and that annoying ping ping ping is at it again. And I’m up. This morning I am making one more attempt to find some buck bait in one corner of the Wildlife Management Area (WMA) near our house. But in the gloom of a cloudy, damp, cold morning there are only 2 little orphan fawns and it’s hard to tell if even one of them is an incipient doe. There are rooster pheasants cackling however, which only turns my frustration 90 degrees back into guilt. Labrador-induced guilt. Lena hasn’t worked since September 28th, the last time John took her bird hunting. And that’s not entirely John’s--or my--fault. Blame it on the Lena Beana. It was one of the few times John went out alone bird hunting. (The birds can escape a single hunter more slickly than a pair.) It had been raining and windy for several days, and this was, again, a Friday. Since we don’t work 9 to 5 we choose to hunt weekdays, and work on the weekend. Less pressure. Lena and John both needed the outing, so John drove out to one of his favorite pheasant spots, parked the truck and let Lena out to get some of the yips out (she is only 2) while he slipped on his vest, checked his shotgun shells and caught up with her. Lena was so happy. She ran and she ran, doing wide circles around John, nose in the air. Her predecessor, Gideon, would run straight out after being released for about 50 yards, do one tight in-place spin then straight as an arrow another 50 yards before settling down to hunt. They all seem to love cir-cles. But John was busy checking out the cover as he crossed the fence and headed into the wind, and didn’t notice Lena’s circles were getting smaller. Several hundred yards from the

truck, Lena’s and John’s paths collided. He went down, hard, his good knee--the right one--dislocated. This was the first time the right one had gone out and it was intense pain and rolling around on the ground trying to force the knee cap back into place. Sensing an opportunity, Lena returned to John, gave his face a good slurp then sat at his shoulder. Oh, she thought, this is a good game. Since that day we have heard more than a few Lab-bites-man stories from our shotgun loony friends. Daniel’s Lab knocked him over, breaking 3 ribs. A friend of a friend was out ice fishing with his Lab, and the dog came up fast behind him and bumped the back of his knee. When we heard that, John and I both winced, but it wasn’t his knee that was hurt, it was his shoulder. Broken. Must have reached out to break his fall. And of course this isn’t John’s first lab-in-duced dislocat-ed knee. Our yellow Lab (circa 1990) was helping John go collect the mail and halfway up the long drive she blind-sided him, crashing right into his left knee. For those of you who’ve never dislocated a knee, I can attest to the pain. I did it once, way back in the dark ages. But mine wasn’t Lab-related. I was a teenager, doing the Limbo, at home, with my big sister (you can’t make up such boring injury stories) and spent 5 days in the hospital. Right knee. The doctor said if I ever did it again, I’d need surgery, and that was back in the days when knee surgery scars were 6 feet long. I gave up the Limbo forever.

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John forgave her immediately, but poor Lena is now going nuts and gaining weight with the inactivity. I’m not that bad a wingshooter, and I could take Lena out for a few birds here and there. But for one thing, this has been a pretty bad bird year. The spring was dry enough when they were hatching, but it stayed dry and very few grasshoppers hatched. No easy chick food. When we started looking for birds back in Septem-ber, the first reports were that forest grouse were few and far between, but then we kept running into coveys of pheassants the size of Hungarian partridge--with no definitive coloring to mark a rooster. That had to be a third clutch, and since pheas-ants are the only bird we have that re-clutches, that was a very bad sign. The bigger factor however was, with John unable to walk, it was up to me to fill the freezer, so even those little third-clutch birds had to wait until I’d filled three of my tags. I got an antelope doe 12 days into the season, but the deer hunting is now dragging on and the guilt is getting almost as thick as the stress. This morning, I listened to the pheasants cackle as the twin fawns grazed in the wheat stubble. All I needed was a bit of buck-bait and a little luck. This area was buck only, but it was loaded with whitetails, my favorite big game. The morn-ing before I’d been about 200 yards to the north, between the irrigation ditch and the flood gates at the shallow end of a big reservoir. I’d started out watching south, with the wind in my face, but 2 minutes into shooting light a doe and buck came out directly downwind of me in a row of willows and alders. I turned and in the dimmest of light saw the doe‘s ears sticking up above a willow branch, and then the buck trailing her--broadside--staring daggers at me. And before I could put my slug gun up to make sure of antlers in the scope, he was gone resuming his early rut pleading/begging chase after the doe. Here, the deer rut peaks on the 18 or 19 of November. This was only the 9th. He was ready, and she was just starting to get ready. Reminded me of the Bar 19 in Lewistown Montana on Saturday night. (I wonder if that number is a coincidence?) So the bucks were starting to be stupid. That was good news and this year Thanksgiving comes late. With the season ending the Sunday after Turkey Day, this was one of those years when we’d have a good go at rutty bucks. If I could get them within 125 yards of my slug gun. Or there are always the moun-tains, where I could rifle them at 300 yards. Trouble is, game animals have a sense of distance, too. Take birds. One year John and I went up to Nunavut to hunt caribou. The year before, John had hunted in the same area and it was covered with stupid little ptarmigan. “Bring your sling-shot,” he’d said. “You’ll get lots of chances and it won’t disturb the caribou.” So I bought a heavy-duty sling shot, practiced on the local feral cats, and got pretty good. But the first day of caribou hunting, I brought the slingshot and the birds were at shotgun range. That afternoon I shot my caribou, so started carrying a shotgun for peter-miggans, as our host called them. They got up at rifle range. So now I’m torn. Where will I get at least one deer down more quickly? WMA--shotgun only--or anywhere else with a rifle? Population density is higher on the WMA, but it’s been two weeks since the season started and they are getting

pretty nocturnal. Always tracks, always pellets of poop, but never fur in sight. In the daytime they’re hold up in the noisy woods. Dead leaves, crisp sawgrass and dry reeds are a pretty effective early warning system. Of course they’re getting just as nocturnal outside the WMA. Outside I can use a rifle, and shoot either sex whitetail. (The WMA is buck only.) More choices, and it is always good to be able to reach out and, well, you know. Touch someone.

After an hour of absolutely nothing moving except one annoying rooster who insists I notice his cackling (Did you hear THAT? Well, how about THAT?!) I pick up and head home to await John’s report. He’s been off after his favorite big game animal: mule deer, again buck only in this area. He was going to come with me this am, but decided it would be safer for him to walk in sagebrush flats in dim shooting light rather than farm fields in the dark. (His knee is getting better, but we don’t want to re-injure it now. After rifle season, there will be more Lena season and he has to be mobile for that.) But an hour later, he’s home and while he’s seen more game than I have, he hasn’t seen a mule deer buck he’d shoot. He’s not looking for Mr. Big, but he’s not looking for Mr. Fork-horn either. A nice 2 1/2 year old that would have lots of meat, but no taxidermy bill would be his ideal. This morning he saw some whetetail does running, probably from the pickup he’d seen on an unauthorized road. (It’s a ranch, and they’ve given us access, but not on that road.) And for the fourth time, he has not spotted the herd of muley does and fawns he saw the first night, and assumed would be his buck bait. Like I said, it’s that time of the season. You’re doing all the work, all the scouting, re-patterning the animals every day to keep up with the effects we hunters are having on them. In your brain you know that you’re doing all you can, and the rest is luck: one morning you’ll do the same thing you’ve done for the last two weeks, and voilà, meat on the game cart. You know it can happen that way, as surely as you know that some years you’ll hunt to the last dying light of hunting season and never see the buck you want. Until you drive out of camp the first morning after hunting season and 50 yards down the dirt road home, he’s standing in the middle of the road. Broadside and flat-footed. He’s so jaded, you can reach out the truck win-dow and pat his butt as you drive past. And what can you say? That’s hunting. If it was easy we’d call it grocery shopping. And admit it: it’s what you love The long trudge, the days on end of seeing nothing you’d want to take home, and then suddenly up pops your chance. And you don’t muff it. At that moment it’s hard to keep from shouting “Gotcha!” It makes all the rest of it worth while. So, yeah, the alarm will go off tomorrow, and the floor will still be cold, but John and I are re-hatching our plans. We’re thinking of taking a long walk along that un-authorized road (unauthorized only for vehicles, okay for walking-in.) and spread out a few hundred yards and sit. There have been does, both whitetails and muleys, and soon, very soon, there will be bucks. And then poor little Lena will get to go bird hunting. I’ve been keeping a list of all those cackling roosters. I know their favorite hang-outs. Their time is coming.

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Good Eats Cookie Corner

Second Breakfast à la Charlie Palmer & RemingtonServes 4-6EC Here’s a stick-to-your-ribs late breakfast that is also easy to make. It’s from chef Charlie Palmer’s latest book, Camp Cooking. Now some of the recipes in his book have hard to find ingredients--at least in my part of the world. But this recipe is as down to earth as sausage and eggs. He calls it a frittata, but it’s sausage and eggs--with potatoes--mixed all together in a one dish breakfast that will keep you going all day. Now Charlie recommends flipping the frittata over onto a plate to serve it, but you can also just bring the skillet to the table and serve it up in wedges, like a pie. It’s delicious either way. So, why is Chef Palmer’s recipe in my cooking col-umn? Partly because I reviewing the book in this issue (page5) but mostly because I made mine with Rosemary Breakfast Bangers, page 103 in my new cookbook, Sausage Season. The combination of rosemary sausage and jalapeno peppers is what East Coast restaurants call ‘fusion.’ I found it just plain deli-cious. I wish I’d thought of adding a frittata to the ‘what to do with sausage’ section of my book. But here it is now:

Wild Game Sausage FrittataIngredients8 large eggs1 pound sausage, precooked, cooled, and sliced thin3 cups diced potatoes¼ cup olive oilTwo 4-ounce cans chopped green chilies, drained4 green onions, chopped1 teaspoon kosher salt½ teaspoon coarse ground black pepperCooking1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs and then mix in the rest of the ingredients except for the olive oil. 2. In a 10-inch skillet, heat the olive oil over high heat. (Use all the oil; there will be a lot of egg.) When the oil is shimmer-ing and just starting to smoke, pour the egg mixture into the center of the skillet steadily. Don’t dump it in, but a steady stream. Cook until the frittata edges just start to brown (about 6 minutes), then transfer the skillet to the pre-heated oven. Bake until the eggs are set, about 25-30 minutes. (Check the eggs by sticking a fork in 3 to 4 places around the frittata. They will be firm, not liquid, when set.) 3. Remove the frittata from the oven and let it cool a few min-utes. Then serve as is, or invert it onto a plate. To invert it, set a plate face down on the skillet and carefully turn the skillet over, holding the handle of the skillet and plate with the palm of your hand. Lift the pan, and you have a beautifully browned breakfast. *To pre-cook cased sausage: line a baking pan with foil and arrange the sausages with space between. Roast at 350 for 30 minutes. For bulk, just brown lightly in a skillet. Then cool. **Chef Palmer recommends dicing and parboiling an actual whole potato. I short-cutted that process by using square cut frozen hash browns, well thawed.

Holiday 3-Way CookiesEC So what the heck does 3-way mean? It means these might just be the most versatile cookies you ever made. Add just the Heath chips to the cookie dough and you’ll get a sweet on sweet cookie; add just the cinnamon chips and you’ll have a cookie with a bit of the Red Hot vibe; add both, as I’ve written it here, and you’ll have a cookie that is both sweet and tangy. We liked all three variations. However you do it, they’re perfect for carrying in your hunting pack for lunch or keeping out on Thanksgiving and Christmas to keep the troops happy while they wait for the turkey.

Holiday 3-Way Cookiesmakes 3 dozenIngredients½ cup butter (1 stick), softened¾ cup white sugar¾ cup brown sugar¾ cup canned pumpkin pureé2 teaspoons vanilla1 egg2 ½ cups flour1 teaspoon baking soda1 teaspoon baking powder½ teaspoon salt1 teaspoon ground cinnamon½ teaspoon ground nutmeg10 ounce bag Hershey’s cinnamon chips8 ounce bag Heath English Toffee BitsPreparation1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Beat the butter and sugar (white and brown) together in a large bowl until well blended, then add the pumpkin puree, vanilla and egg. Beat until those are well blended. 2. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Give these dry ingredients a good stir, then gradually stir them into the butter/sugar mixture. Beat the batter until smooth. Now, gently fold in the cinnamon chips and Heath bar bits. 3. Drop the batter by rounded tablespoons onto a greased cookie sheet leaving a half inch space around each cookie. Bake about 18 minutes, or until the edges are lightly browned and firming up. Cool on the baking sheets for 2 minutes, then transfer them to a cooling rack to cool completely.

**A word about ‘softening’ butter or margarine for cookies:Softening refers to the fact that the fat is soft enough to beat it with either spoon or electric beaters and incorporate sugar. The easiest way to soften fat is to leave it out on the kitchen counter overnight. But most of us don’t plan ahead.(I’m as guilty of that as anyone.) So, we end up taking the butter right out of the fridge and sticking it in the microwave. That works. But a little goes a long way. Try 10 seconds on high, then touch it with the back of a spoon. If the butter gives way pretty easily, stop. If not, give it 3 to 5 seconds more. But don’t liquefy it. That changes the texture of your cookie.

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Game Care Notes Good StuffHanging AroundEC They said computers would make our lives easier, that automation would give us all more leisure. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the case at our house. Life gets quicker and quicker, and seems like there’s no time for just taking a break. Well, there’s at least one place taking a break will bring big rewards--fairly in-stantly. It’s taking a break between the time you get that elk, deer, antelope, moose or whatever down and when you start cutting it up and sticking it in the freezer. I’m not even talking about aging. I’m talking about tak-ing that 2 to 3 days after the shot to let the animal go into and out of rigor mortis. I know how it is. You hunt all weekend, finally get home Sunday night, and start butchering on Monday evening after work because after work is all the time you have and you don’t want to lose any of the meat. That’s a good idea, but if you cut and freeze the meat before it’s out of rigor, chances are great that even that tender little forkhorn you brought home will be tough. All warm-blooded animals go through rigor mortis, birds as well as big game. In warm weather, it happens fairly quickly. In cold, more slowly. It’s hard to predict the timing, but easy to tell what’s happening. Rigor has not started when the animal is loosey-goosey; it’s in rigor when it’s stiff and unbending, and done when the joints once again can be bent. (Not as easily as before rigor, but enough to manipulate the joints for skinning and butch-ering.) Scientists call it ‘thaw rigor’ when you freeze an animal during rigor. It can happen on frigid hunts when you dont intend it, or when you process the meat too soon after the kill. Let rigor run its course before processing the meat and you will eat better the rest of the year. Okay, so what about that ‘unintended’ freezing while in rigor? Years ago, John was hunting in ten below weather in East-ern Montana and killed a nice young mule deer buck. He and his friend Kirby hung him outdoors on the meat pole, and thought everything was fine. But a few weeks later, it became pretty obvi-ous that the meat was tougher than he’d expected it to be. He’d killed 3 animals that fall, so he sorted the packages by date, then kept careful watch whenever he cooked that particular one. From nose to tail it was tough, which it should not have been. From that buck on, John always packed coolers along with us on late season hunts, just in case. Then when an animal is down and the temps are headed or already way below zero, we quarter the animal and toss it into the coolers with ice cubes stuffed between the quarters to allow the cold to circulate so they don’t fail to cool enough--and sour--but close the lid so they don’t freeze. As with hot weather, you still keep a watch on the meat, checking the coolers every 6 hours or so, and making sure the meat all cools down in 3 to 4 hours, but doesn’t freeze. Once all surfaces of the quarters have cooled to 30-40F, then you can toss the ice and close the cooler tight to keep out the frigid cold. For larger animals like bull elk and moose, you’ll need to separate upper from lower legs and bring two large coolers. You just need to make them fit, without boning the meat. That’s anoth-er factor in meat tenderness. If you bone the meat out while it’s in rigor, it contracts with rigor but there’s nothing to force it back into a relaxed state. Leaving the meat attached to the bone stretches the contracted meat out again. If you have to carry the animal out on your back, you’re stuck. But otherwise, bigger is always better.

Hornady Custom Lite .270 Winchester Ammunition

Recently Hornady sent along some of their Custom ammo in .270 Winchester for a pronghorn hunt. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to go because our Labrador, Lena, dislocated my right knee two days before I was due to leave. But I did get to test the ammunition in the Browning A-Bolt loaned for the hunt—and Hornady also sent along a box of their new Custom Lite .270 ammo, loaded with a 120-grain SST at listed 2675 fps. Factory ammunition that’s loaded down to reduce re-coil isn’t a new idea, but this is the first time Hornady’s offered it. The results in the A-Bolt were very interesting, partly be-cause the difference in point of impact of the two Custom loads was only about an inch at 100 yards. Both loads were accurate, but the Lite ammo outshot the full-power 130-grain load by a little bit, 3-shot groups averaging .76”. From the 22” barrel the average muzzle velocity was 2556 fps, plenty for shooting out to 200 yards, or even more. The Custom Lite ammo comes in many popular big game cartridges from .243 Winchester to .300 Winchester Mag-num, including the .30-30, though why it’s available in 7mm-08 and not .25-06 I dunno. There are also a couple of Lite sabot slug loads in 12-gauge, with a 250-grain FTX (flexible tip) spitzer at an advertised 1600 fps or a 300-grain at 1575. (Per-sonally I would go with the 250-grain load, since it would shoot just as flat but kick noticeably less.) While perusing Hornady’s website for details on the Custom Lite ammo I ran across another recent addition: .275 Rigby ammunition, loaded with a 140-grain Interlock Spire Point at 2680 fps. All real rifle loonies know the .275 is simply the British version of the 7x57 Mauser, so all Hornady had to do was headstamp 7x57 brass differently—and they do offer the identi-cal load in 7x57. But the .275 ammo does offer rifle loonies who own .275 Rigbys (either original British or modern custom rifles) brass with the correct headstamp, which can become an issue when traveling to Africa. There’s probably also a warm fuzzy feeling when shooting an impala with the “correct” ammo. The ballistics may not sound like much, but they es-sentially match the original .275 ammo from Kynoch. John Taylor, the famed Irish elephant poacher and author, said this load “always behaves as it should behave. Naturally, I refer only to the animals for which it was designed, and not to beasts running up to 1,000-lbs. of more in weight…. One-shot kills are certain—instantaneous death following whenever you squeeze your trigger.” This has been the experience of quite a few hunt-ers, and not just in Africa.

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Rifle Loony LitCamp Cooking by Charlie Palmerwww.charliepalmer.com $39.95EC Aside from the fact that Camp Cooking is full of classic old Remington art work, this isn’t exactly your classic old camp cookbook. That’s because Charlie Palmer isn’t your typical old camp cook. (Believe me, there are enough of those cookbooks around.) You might have seen Charlie Palmer on the Today show, if you watch the Today show. Or heard that he’s been inducted into the James Beard “Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America.” He’s also has a pretty famous restaurant in New York City --Aureole--where he has gotten critical acclaim for his rambunctious flavors and unexpected combinations of ingredients. Yet, to my tastes, the best recipe in the book was a frittata, essentially an Italian version of a French omelet. (The French-style omelet being the great American Omelet prepared in almost every cafe, diner and chain breakfast restaurant in America.) In fact that frittata is spotlighted on this issue of RLN’s cooking page because it is a classic American one-dish, no-frill meal of eggs, sausage, and potatoes. What I loved about this recipe was that I made it exactly as written--I even fliped the frittata, which certainly isn’t required--and it was delicious. Besides that, everything worked as written. That’s not always true with recipes in magazines and cookbooks. (I knew a woman who went to work for a major, major West coast lifestyle magazine. Her first day she learned that they test all recipes, but then print all of them: the great, the mediocre and the failures. She made a point of keeping her mouth shut, and not cooking any of the recipes they printed.) But back to Chef Palmer’s book: From wild birds, big game, and fish, to beef, chicken and Chocolate Whiskey Espresso Cake Chef Palmer is rambunctious and does combine flavors you might not expect, but if you are tired of the same old camp cooking and want to try something different, this would make a wonderful Christmas present. Just be sure to spread a piece of plastic wrap over the open book as you eat and gaze at the Remington artwork. It’s spectacular.

Handgun Training for Personal Protectionby Richard MannEC

As John Donne said many many years ago, “No man is an island,” and that is no truer than when you’re think-ing of the yahoos outside your door. If you’re not as rich as Rosie O’Donnell or all the other people who can hire 24/7 armed body guards, and don’t even have enough bucks to go to a serious self-defense school like Gunsite, then I’d suggest plunking down $15 for Richard Mann’s book, Handgun Training. It is well worth it.

Let’s start with Richard’s credentials. Until he decided to be a gun writer a few years ago, Mann spent his entire adult life in the military and law enforcement, a lot of it in teaching other military and law enforcement people how to handle guns and stay alive in the field. Before that, he spent his childhood hunting in the hills of West Virginia with his family tracking and hunting the wily wildlife. He is a man born to it. And he hasn’t just been a passive observer. He has walked the walk, and even after quitting law enforcement--after all the gun, combat and training schools they’d put him through--took the Gunsite course. And is still thinking how to better his skills. This is a man who doesn’t sit on his laurels.

Handgun Training takes the best of self-defense training and adds the latest technology--express sights, lazer sights, and red dot sights, how they work, how they’re mounted on the handgun, and how to choose the one that fits your life. From there he discusses the other mod-ern accessories including SureFire flashlights and why they are a useful weapon of self defense. But that’s just the first half of the book. The rest is about the human element: getting it trained to be a useful weapon of self defense, too. As Mann points out, “You gotta be willing.’ That’s rule number 5.

It would be easy to assume that, given the topic, this would be dry, morbid reading. But you would be dead wrong. Richard Mann is a story teller in the old tradition, but with that modern edge that tests all authority, and accepts only what he knows works. He has the creden-tials, he does the testing, and the book is so engaging you’ll be tempted to breeze through it. Don’t. What Mann has to tell you just might save your life or your family’s life.

Order the book at www.amazon.com for $15.13, and once you’re done ordering, check out Richard Mann’s writing. (www.empty-cases.com is his own blog site, but he also writes for American Rifleman, American Hunter, Shooting Illustrated, North American Hunter and a variety of other magazines. He is also the editor for Gun Digest’s Cartridges of the World 13th Edition. I told you he had the chops.)

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Seeing Is BelievingBushnell Elite Tactical 10x40mm RiflescopeJB I’m a fan of fixed-power riflescopes, especially 6x, mostly because they hold up better than lightweight variables. In recent years Bushnell’s Elite Tactical scopes have acquired a fine reputation for toughness and precision, and they include a fixed 10x40mm with a 1” tube. Many of the other Elite Tacticals have 30mm tubes and retail for up to over $2000, but at 15.5 ounces the 10x is pretty light, and the real-world price is around $250. The optics are very sharp and bright, and include Bushnell’s Rainguard anti-moisture coating. The scope held up very well during some early testing on my Heym .300 Winchester Magnum, but shortly afterward the 3-9x variable on Eileen’s .22-250 Savage Axis rifle went haywire. Eileen prefers more magnification than most hunt-ers do on her big game rifles, usually hunting with variables in the 3-9x range cranked all the way up. She’s often commented that what she really needs is a fixed 10x, and I asked if she’d like to field-test the 10x Bush-nell. She said sure, but after seeing the tall, exposed turrets she wasn’t so sure. After an initial range session to sight-in, she was more enthusiastic, really liking the precise adjustments that made sighting-in very easy, and the excellent glass. She also liked the European-style focusing, since she often has a hard time keeping the lock-ring on American-focus scopes tight enough to stay in place. She used the scope quite handily to take a doe pronghorn at 150 yards—not surprising since I’ve seen her shoot deer at 50 yards with a variable set on 10x. Now I just have to figure out how to get my Bushnell test scope back, which might not be possible.

Sausage Seasonwww.riflesandrecipes.com $28 Okay, I know I’m a foodie. It drives me crazy when people who will re-main nameless use a paring knife to ‘carve’ an 5-pound elk roast. It takes me three times as long to shop in my local grocery store as it takes anyone else, and if it’s a store in a strange town, well, just go buy a bag of donuts and make yourself comfortable. I’m going to look at what’s on the shelves and be asking about what people buy on weekends vs. weekdays, and what disappears first around Thanksgiving. (It’s the Jell-O stuff in our local store that goes first). When I go online, I check out the Health section of Google News, and read every story on lettuce and burger recalls, BBC research on food (do you know that people who eat the equivalent of 2 servings of bacon a day have a much higher death rate than the rest of us. I always figured the death rate for all of us was, oh, about 100%...eventually...but you get the point: processed meat is deadly. But that BBC study also points out that if all you do is ‘mince’ (grind) the meat, there is no danger. It’s the curing chemicals and preserva-tives that do it. Instead of curing us of all ills, or preserving us to live forever, it does the opposite. So those are two of the reasons I wrote Sausage Season. The third is I don’t think the word ‘vacuum’ should ever appear on a food label. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to read bologna and hot dog labels more closely.) And the fourth? My friends from West Virginia--when we get to sit around and share a meal--make fun of me because I will not order the sausage and eggs for breakfast in the local cafe. Or the brat for lunch. Or the corn dog at the root beer stand. But hey, I like sausage as much as those guys. I love sausage. I just don’t love what gets thrown in with it. I also love chocolate malteds, French fries and bacon cheeseburgers. If there were no tomorrow, my entire diet would be malteds, burgers and fries, with a few root beer floats, corn dogs and onion rings thrown in. As the movie says, Super Size Me! But lucky us, there will be a tomorrow, so I took appetite in hand and figured out how to make luscious sausage by just ‘mincing.’ No chemicals. No vacuums. For the last two years I’ve been eating as many brats, bangers and dogs as my little heart could possibly want. Three times a day sometimes, and if it weren’t for the higher fat content (game meats, our 99% of the time meat source, average 1 to 4% fat) I would have escaped scot-free. There are still about 35 pounds of sausage in the house, which we moved to the downstairs freezer to slow us down a bit. Cause we did gain weight. I’m not saying how much, but let’s just say all three of us are on a diet--including Lena the Labrador--and will be until we’re back to pre-Sausage Season-making weight. But last Tuesday a reporter from our local paper came to write up the cookbook, and I had to cook sausage for her....probably not 4 pounds, but now someone’s got to eat it. I wonder how much hunting it will take to burn off a brat or two?

More Loony Lit

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Down the BarrelAmmo for Autumn 2013JB

One fairly frequent question we get is: “What rifles and loads do you two plan to use this hunting season?” We’re probably asked this so frequently because we often experiment with new bullets, cartridges and other nifty stuff. This wasn’t always so. Back in the days before I start-ed doing so much gun writing (and didn’t have as much money to spend on rifles, scopes, ammo, etc.), we were very practical. We had three big game rifles, a .257 Roberts, a .270 Winchester and a .30-06, and easily managed to take Montana game from pronghorns to moose, filling our freezers each fall. The only reason we had three rifles, rather than one apiece, was that Eileen didn’t know if she’d really like hunting when she started, so we “borrowed” the .257 Roberts Reming-ton 722 that had belonged to my grandmother. My cousin Eric had possession of the rifle, but he hunted only a little, now and then, and had never taken any sort of big game. Eileen killed a big pronghorn buck with the .257 that fall, discovering she really liked hunting, and Eric never got the .257 back—except for briefly borrowing it himself eight years later to finally take his first deer while hunting with me in the mountains above our little Montana town. Eric decided he liked hunting when he got something, but since he’s left-eyed (one reason he hadn’t hunted much with the right-handed .257) and also wanted to hunt elk, after the season I started looking around and found a left-handed Rem-ington 700 BDL .30-06 on the used rack at Capital Sports & Western Wear in Helena. Eileen also wanted to hunt elk with a somewhat lighter rifle than the 722, and during the fall big game season Browning sent me one of the first A-Bolts in .270 Winchester for a field-test. She liked the light weight (at the time about as light as any factory .270) and the detachable mag-azine, since she found loading the magazine of the .257 difficult on cold mornings. Now she could fill the A-Bolt’s magazine in the warmth of our house, then pop it in the rifle when we got out of the pickup to start hunting. She killed a whitetail with it on Thanksgiving Day of 1985, her second deer. At that point I took over the .257 for a lot of my hunt-ing, since with full-power 100-grain handloads at 3250 fps the trajectory was noticeably flatter than my .30-06 with 165’s. Of course, this was before laser rangefinders, when 400 yards was

considered a long shot. Today hardly anybody admits to shoot-ing western deer (let alone pronghorns) at less than 600 yards—and also wouldn’t choose to use a .257 Roberts for the task. But even when handicapped by the .257 I still man-aged to take my then-biggest pronghorn at 430 yards with one 100-grain Nosler Partition, and also managed to finish off an-other buck at 550 yards that a client I was guiding had wounded. Both were due to lots of practice on rockchucks, and knowing how to use my scope’s reticle as a rangefinder. We only used three rifles then, however, we used sev-en different loads. Eileen hadn’t started handloading yet so I fooled around with different .270 bullets and found the A-Bolt put most into the same basic place at 100 yards. It proved pretty easy to work up accurate loads for varmints (90-grain Sierra hollow-point at 3100 with 50.0 grains of IMR4895), deer and pronghorn (130 Hornady Spire Point at 3000 with 57 grains of IMR4350), and elk (150 Nosler Partition at 2850 with 58.5 H4831), and she didn’t have to change the scope setting when using any of the three. Over the next four seasons she used the A-Bolt to take 10 big game animals in a row with one bullet each, the list including pronghorns, whitetails, mule deer, elk and moose. In the .257 I used two loads, the 75-grain Sierra hol-low-point at 3400 fps (45.0 IMR4895), and the 100-grain No-sler Partition at 3250 (48.5 grains of IMR4350). Many hand-loaders would consider the 100-grain load pretty hot, but .257 data has always been really wimpy, with even +P loads limited to 60,000 psi. Using the old Homer Powley formula that pres-sure increases at twice the rate of the powder charge, and Hodg-don’s present 45.5 grain maximum of IMR4350 with 100-grain bullets, 48.5 grains would get around 62-63,000 psi—about like most maximum .270 loads. In my .30-06, an original tang-safety Ruger 77, the pronghorn and deer load was 58.5 grains of IMR4350 with the 165-grain Nosler Solid Base, the muzzle velocity 2900 fps. The elk load was the 200-grain Nosler Partition and 60.0 grains of H4831 for 2675. As in Eileen’s .270, both loads shot to the same place at 100 yards, and the 165 shot particularly well, 3-shot groups averaging around 2” at 300 yards, not bad for a factory rifle, a 4x scope and handloads not nearly as refined as I can make them today. I’d started using the 200-grain Partition when hunting elk in the thick, steep country near the Idaho Panhandle in the late 70’s, when the bullet was a lathe-turned “semi-spitzer,” and when Nosler turned it into an impact-extruded spitzer didn’t see a reason to change. It also worked on several deer and even one pronghorn. The front ends of the two Nosler bullets were identical, so to be able to tell the difference I loaded the 165’s in Remington cases and the 200’s in Winchesters. During the 1984 season the loads got mixed up a little, and I shot a doe prong-horn at 200 yards with a 200-grain Partition. She went about 40 yards and keeled over, just like she probably would have with a 165, though less meat got shot up. Only three powders were used in all seven loads: IMR4895, IMR4350 and H4831. There weren’t nearly as many powders available back then, but we managed to get by with three, even in the late 1980’s after acquiring a couple of real varmint rifles, a .223 Remington and .220 Swift, and my first “big” rifle, a .338 Winchester Magnum. I also used only 3-4 powders for loading all my handgun and shotgun ammo. To-

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day I have over 75 different smokeless powders on hand, and use at least a dozen frequently in our rifle handloads. We also have quite a few more rifles, but I still wouldn’t feel terribly handicapped with only three powders for our rifle loads, though today they’d probably be Li’l Gun, TAC and H4350. We also wouldn’t feel inadequately armed with only Hornady Spire Points and Nosler Partitions, but our lives have become one long field-test, where different bullets, powders and cartridges must be tried in all sorts of hunting.This year we don’t have as many Montana big game tags as usual, due to bad winters, wolves and diseases that reduced many local populations, but we still decided to try some new stuff, mixed in with some old reliables. For the past few years Eileen has hunted Montana with a pair of rifles, her New Ultra Light Arms Model 20 in .257 Roberts she bought to replace the NULA .270 she’d been hunt-ing with since the early 1990’s. (The .270 eventually gave her recoil headaches, and the .257 didn’t.) She loads it with a maxi-mum +P charge of Ramshot Hunter and the 100-grain Barnes Tipped TSX, for about 3200 fps. The .257 has worked very well on a bunch of deer and pronghorn, but eventually she discovered NULA stocks don’t fit her particularly well. The straight comb slopes downward a little from rear to front, which works fine for typical short-necked, square shouldered men like me. But she has a more typical woman’s combination of a long neck and sloping shoul-ders, and the toe of the NULA’s recoil pad ends up in the middle of her shoulder. A Monte Carlo stock fits her much better. She shot a Weatherby Ultra Lightweight Mark V in .240 Weatherby Magnum for a while, which fit better than the NULA, but one day she picked up a Husqvarna .243 I’d just purchased over the Internet, the model based on the small-ring Mauser action. The rifle was not only almost as light as the Weatherby, but the walnut Monte Carlo stock fit her even better. After buying the rifle I’d mounted a 6x36 Leupold scope and thrown together a load that had shot well in other .243’s, 41.0 grains of H4350 and the 100-grain Nosler Partition. The first group at 100 yards was well under an inch so I called it good, and with a 100-grain bullet at 2900 fps the rifle kicked less than either the .240 or the .257. She couldn’t part with the .257, but the .240 went down the road. Recently, however, she’d pur-chased a .22-250 off the Internet, a Sav-age Axis priced so cheap she couldn’t resist. (They don’t cost much even when new, but used it was a real bargain.) I borrowed it for an article on loading the .22-250 with some newer powders, but before the tests installed Dyna Bore Coat in the barrel, since Savage bores are typically a little rough. I also got the factory trigger pull from over five pounds down to 3-1/2 by replacing the spring. Eileen was pretty intrigued with one of the loads I’d tried with the new Cutting Edge Raptor, a monolithic that, un-

like the Barnes TSX, is designed to lose its petals on impact, to create a bigger wound. Some other mono bullets are designed to do this, including the GS Custom made in South Africa and the Norma Kalahari from Sweden, but to my knowledge the Raptor’s the first made in America. (To be fair, Randy Brooks didn’t exactly design the X-Bullet to retain all its petals, but many hunters are impressed with 100% weight retention, and some of the earlier X’s lost some or all their petals. Personally I never saw any effect on killing power, and in fact it probably helped, but Randy gave his customers what they wanted, and today’s TSX’s usually do retain all their petals.) Eileen found that a grain less than Hodgdon’s listed maximum for Hodgdon CFE223 got over 4300 fps and very fine accuracy. She shot the bullet into a wax Test Tube (now unfortunately discontinued) and found that even at warp speed the little Raptor did exactly what it was designed to do. She planned to first field-test it on a coyote, partly to see how much of a hole it made in the pelt, but we also drew doe pronghorn tags for an area close to town, and when the opportunity arose she used the .22-250 and the little Raptor. The big doe stood quartering-on at about 150 yards, and Eileen put the little bullet between the point of the shoulder and the breastbone. The doe dropped and, aside from a few twitches, never moved. I’d sighted-in around a dozen of my rifles before the season, but for pronghorns carried another NULA. Well, carrying is a strong word for somebody who was essentially riding shotgun. On September 28th our chocolate Labrador retriever, Lena, was zipping around excitedly while she and I went bird hunting for the first time in several days, due to almost constant heavy rains. She zipped directly into my right knee, bending it about 10 degrees in a direction it had never bent before, and the knee-

cap ended up on the outside of my leg. I col-lapsed, naturally--and naturally she walked up and licked my face. After a minute or two I managed to get the joint back in place and the kneecap back in front, but when prong-horn season started two weeks later I was limited to glassing from the passenger seat. I didn’t even bring a rifle all of the first week, since even with a hiking staff I couldn’t truly walk yet, much less go on a pronghorn stalk. But by the time Eileen got her doe, during the third week of October, I was able to limp around enough to trundle the empty game cart across the prairie, do the field-dressing, and help her strap the doe to the cart—though Eileen had to push the cart back to the pickup. On that day I’d finally brought along my NULA .257 Weatherby Magnum, with a handload combining the 120-grain Nosler Partition and 69.0 grains of Reloder 25 for 3300 fps. (I’d actually planned to work up a load with a sleeker bullet, but my knee pre-

vented any more range time before the season started.)While I could limp around OK, I knew the knee wasn’t up to any long crawls through the bunch grass and prickly pear, and wanted all the range possible, especially for what would probably be a very quick shot. When sighted-in two inches high at 100 yards, the 120 Partition is two inches low at 300—and beyond that the

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extra dots in the 3.5-10x Leupold make longer shots possible, even for a gimpy hunter. The 3-shot group fired while checking the scope measured .63” at 100 yards, not bad for a rifle weigh-ing 6-3/4 pounds with scope. The bullets printed in exactly the same place they had the year before, and only twice has any-thing different happened with a NULA—and in both instances the scope had gone sour. All together I had eight tags, the general elk, deer and black bear tags that come with the Montana’s “Sportsman’s Li-cense,” plus local pronghorn and whitetail doe tags, and two wolf and one mountain lion tag. I decided to sight-in or check the scopes on a bunch of rifles, just in case one might be abso-lutely perfect for the diverse terrain near our home. We live in a 15-mile-wide valley containing the first 60 miles of the Mis-souri River. Mountain ranges rise over 9000 feet on either side of the valley, and several channels of the river form a wooded delta on the upper end of a 35-mile-long reservoir. Obviously a bunch of rifles had to be ready for any eventuality. The most obvious was the Sauer drilling purchased a few years ago from our Nevada friend Bruce Cunningham, with a pair of 16-gauge barrels over a 6.5x57R rifle barrel. Bruce had supplied several boxes of Hirtenberger factory ammo loaded with120-grain Sierra ProHunters (yes, Europeans use a lot of American bullets). The load chronographed around 2775 from the 23” barrel, and had worked fine on whitetail and mule deer, but I wanted a stouter bullet for hunting in places where we might run into an elk. There isn’t much loading data for the 6.5x57R, but its powder capacity is almost identical to the 6.5x55. I figured starting 6.5x55 loads from the Nosler manual for the 125-grain Partition would be low-pressure enough for the break action, and probably have close enough to the same velocity as the Hirtenberger ammo to shoot to the same place. Several other rifles had been sighted-in in years past, but I took them out to the range again to confirm they were still good to go, or to tweak the scope. Here are the results: CZ 9.3x62 550, 250 AccuBond, 60.5 Varget, 2650 fps: This was still right on, as it usually is since it was restocked in one of the fancy-wood laminates from Kilimanjaro rifles. It would be the rifle of choice for working “black timber” for deer and elk, though it will also easily reach to 300+ yards across a clearcut or meadow. Heym .300 Winchester, 165 Hornady Interlock, 73.0 RL-19, 3100 fps: I use this rifle often to test new scopes, since it’s very accurate but kicks hard enough to shake their innards. Its normal scope is an old 6x42 Leupold M8 that never loses zero, in Talley detachable steel mounts. When testing another scope I take the 6x42 off, mount the other scope in Talley rings, shoot the rifle until the scope lives or dies, then put the 6x42 back on. The 6x42 was still dead-on, exactly where it had been before the last scope test, shooting a 3-shot group of .58”, aver-age for this rifle and load. Pre-’64 Winchester Model 70 .300 H&H, 180 Ballistic Tip, 66.0 Hunter, 3000 fps: This rifle has a 6x36 Leupold M8 in Talley Lightweight mounts, and the scope needed to be tweaked a little, probably because the stock had shifted a little in the two years since last hunting with the rifle. This rifle’s barrel isn’t exactly pristine (well, neither is the rifle, or I wouldn’t have

been able to afford it) and the final confirming group measured 1.19”. J.C. Higgins .30-06, built on the small-ring Husqvarna commercial Mauser action,180 Partition, 58.0 Hunter, 2770 fps: This ammo was actually a load worked up for a .30-06 that’s wandered into the Kingdom of Formerly Owned Rifles, but it shot just about like most other loads in this light-barreled rifle, averaging a little over an inch. Merkel K-1 .308, 150 AccuBond, 46.5 Varget, 2850 fps: I hadn’t hunted with this light little break-action single-shot in several years, and had changed the scope to a 3-9x Bausch & Lomb Elite 3000. The final group measured .88”, about average for this rifle. Ruger .30-40 Krag double, 180 Hornady Interlock, 48.0 H4350, 2450 fps: This rifle was built by an unknown gun-smith on a Ruger Red Label 20-gauge shotgun frame. I’d ex-perimented considerably to find a load that regulated well, and used H4350, both because it’s a Extreme powder so the regula-tion won’t change at different temperatures, and because H4350 seems to always work in .30-40’s with 180-grain bullets. The three pairs of shots used to sight-in were 1.52”, 1.26” and .78” apart at 100 yards. (I should have tried this load to start with.) Ruger .30-40 No. 3, 180 Hornady Interlock, 48.0 H4350, 2450 fps: I bought this rifle a couple of years ago, but had never fired it. The first 3-shot group at 100 yards, with the same load used in the double, measured .69”. After adjusting the scope the second group landed two inches above point of aim, and measured .95”. Load “development” and sight-in done! Weatherby Ultra Lightweight Mark V, 7mm Weath-erby Magnum, 160 Nosler Partition Weatherby factory load, 3185 fps: I used this rifle last year to take a 6-point elk on a hunt Weatherby sponsored on the other side of the mountains from our valley, a handy deal for getting elk meat home. I liked the rifle so well I bought it, and still had enough factory ammo for the season. The light, fluted barrel doesn’t group as accurately after the first three shots, but the final 3-shot group from a cold barrel, to confirm sight-in, measured .56”, a little smaller than average. Serengeti Walkabout 7x57, 140 Sierra ProHunter, 48.5 H4350 and 150-grain Nosler Partition, 47.0 H4350: This rifle’s scope went batty during sight-in, so I mounted an ultra-reliable 3x20 Leupold with the Heavy Duplex reticle, one of the new 3x’s that had already proven itself on my .416 Rigby. The final Sierra group during sight-in measured .72”; the Nosler group was slightly smaller and lower, with all six shots clustering in a little over an inch. (Yes, small groups can be shot even with low-power scopes and heavy reticles, as long as the aiming point is large enough. In this instance it was a 4” blue diamond on a Mountain Plains target.) As I write this the only big game animal we’ve got-ten so far is Eileen’s pronghorn; I saw some but not where my knee could take me. Oh, and I did shoot off the head of the only ruffed grouse seen all fall with the .257 Weatherby—legal in Montana on “mountain grouse.” After deer and elk season opened a couple of weeks ago, Eileen passed up a small mule deer buck, but this week the deer rut really kicks in, and some-thing else should fall to one rifle or another.

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Honest GunsCZ 550 Magnum .416 RigbyJB

Anybody who’s read Robert Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter, the story of his first safari in Africa, knows about professional hunt-er Harry Selby’s bolt-action .416 Rigby. Selby acquired the Rigby after an accident with his .470 double, but ended up liking the .416 so much he used it as his primary (but not only) back-up rifle for most of his long career as PH in Kenya, Tanzania, and Botswana. There have been some myths circulated about Selby’s .416, due to other writers than Ruark. For instance, it was not pur-chased in a hurry as a make-do rifle. The .470 was broken at the tail end of the last safari Selby guided that season, so he had some time to look around. To clear the record Selby eventually wrote that “over a fifty-five year career I have used .470’s for four years and a .458 for maybe six to eight years. The Rigby .416 was always my weapon of choice and if I was to start a hunting career all over again the first rifle I would acquire would be a Rigby .416.” Like many American gun writers, I got to handle and shoot Harry Selby’s .416 during a break in a duck and deer hunt on Wing-mead Plantation in Arkansas. As Selby neared retirement age, he made a conscious decision to sell most of his firearms to “good homes.” Wingmead’s owner is an avid hunter, who’d gone on safari with Selby a number of times, and ended up with the famous rifle, though after it had been rebarreled because Selby shot it out (think about that!) over the decades of safari backup. Contrary to another myth, however, Selby did not replace the .416 with a .458 Winchester because the rebarreling took so long. Rigby fitted an Austrian-made barrel and refinished the stock as quickly as possible, but the rifle was held up by a British customs agent who apparently was anti-hunting, and noticed the rifle was being shipped through South Africa to Botswana. At the time Great Britain (like many countries) had an embargo against South Africa. The then head of Rigby, Paul Roberts, went over the woman’s head and got the rifle back to Harry, but only after three years. In the meantime Selby used a push-feed Winchester Model 70 .458, but says comparing the Winchester to the Rigby was like comparing “chalk and cheese.” The wear on the blueing and stock when I shot the rifle in Arkansas was mostly due to Selby’s use after the rifle came back from Rigby. The first thing that impressed me was the rifle’s relatively light weight and fine balance. Many larger-bore “stopping rifles” weigh 10 pounds or more, but Selby was more concerned with quick handling than reducing recoil. Even at 9-1/4 pounds, how-ever, the rifle recoil was quite tolerable when I fired it offhand.

The second thing that impressed me was the action, a standard (not magnum) 98 Mauser. Supposedly modifying a standard 98 for a big round like the .416 Rigby weakens it considerably, but the .416 Rigby’s maximum SAAMI pressure is 52,000 psi, 10,000 psi lower than the .375 H&H. The action worked very slickly, due to being cycled so often, and fed and ejected the big rounds perfectly. One other myth is that Selby’s left-handed, because he shoots left-handed. Instead he’s apparently left-eyed, which wouldn’t have been much problem if the .416 had a scope, but it never did. “Cycling the bolt was no big deal, I merely lowered the stock slightly, gripping the pistol grip with my left hand and with my right worked the bolt fast enough. In any case I prefer one or two precisely aimed shots to a fusillade of random rapid fire.” The Arkansas hunt took place in December of 1999. While I had a very good semi-custom Whitworth Mauser in .375 H&H, I’d always wanted something a little bigger as well, and decided to put together an approximation of the Selby .416. Initially I panned a .416 Remington Magnum on a Winchester Model 70 “Classic” action, since bolt actions big enough to hold the .416 Rigby were hard to come by. Luckily, throughout 2000 I was too busy to do anything about it, and in 2001 my friend Steve Bodio (who writes about many things, including falconry and hunting firearms) decided to sell a CZ 550 Mag-num in .416 Rigby he’d purchased for a planned Zimbabwe hunt that for some reason never came about. I received not only the rifle but some Federal factory ammo. The buttstock was too long for me (European compa-nies often make stocks longer than necessary, so they can be shortened), and he comb was also the humpbacked Bavarian style. The forend also overly long, but I knew that inside the stock something very similar to the Selby rifle was struggling to be set free, so applied a rasp to both buttstock and forend. (It so happens that Harry Selby did the same thing to his Rigby not long after first acquiring it, though unlike me he rasped off the checkering, later getting the rifle recheckered by a gunsmith in South Africa.) I’d rasp on the comb a little, then mount the rifle with my eyes closed and them to see how the factory express sights lined up. This is much like fitting a shotgun, and eventually the sights were perfectly aligned—one of the “secrets” of be-ing able to shoot irons really fast. As a result I can place the front bead alone on fist-sized rocks out to 50 yards and bust ‘em nicely, without even looking at the rear sight. Luckily, the same spar varnish I normally use for finishing stocks matched the finish of the CZ’s stock perfectly. After everything was done I put the rifle on a scale and it weighed nine pounds, five ounces. Perfect! Finally I did a little slicking up of the action and in-stalled a heavier magazine spring. It feeds ammunition loaded with any sort of bullet perfectly. Some people feel compelled to replace the bolt handle and trigger of the CZ’s, along with installing a Winchester Model 70 type safety, but I’ve always preferred the compact 3-position CZ’s factory safety to the long sweep of a Model 70 safety. The trigger is a single-set, but its easily adjustable, and I found that if the primary pull was ad-justed to three pounds, the set feature went away. In 2002 the CZ went to Botswana’s Okavango Delta and helped take my first Cape buffalo. “Helped” is the word be-

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What’s Next? Christmas is, of course, next, after a brief day of Thanksgiving. And if you haven’t found the perfect Christmas present yet for your father, son, brother-in-law, sister or your-self, Sausage Season is a perfect gift that will keep on giving throughout the year. (My Dad once gave me an 11-inch pie pan for Christmas, hint hint. Sausage is even better than pie.Imagine giving a sausage book to your brother and having him be the family expert. Hmmm. Maybe it’s a better selfie gift. By the way did you know an 11-inch pie pan is 50% bigger than a standard 9”? My dad knew his pies and his math.) And while you’re at it, don’t forget Slice of the Wild. I didn’t realize it when I was hip deep in casings, but if every-thing you shoot needs to be made into sausage, then you need to go back to the basics of Slice: field ddressing, hanging, ag-ing, cutting not to mention cleanliness and a little better skillet skills. I’ve posted the indexes for both books on our web site: just go to www.riflesandrecipes.com. Click on Eileen’s Cookbooks, then scroll down on the cookbook you want to look at. There’s a PDF file of the index at the end of each write-up. Merry Christmas! EC

cause the first shot came from my Ruger No. 1 single-shot .375 H&H. The bull took off running as if it wasn’t hit, so I grabbed the .416 from one of the trackers, swinging it like a wingshooter on a quartering-away pheasant. When the bead passed the buf-falo’s shoulder the rifle went off almost automatically, just like a side-by-side passing a rooster’s beak, and after the heavy whop of the 400-grain bullet he grunted in a deep “oof” like a boxer hit solidly in the solar plexus . The bull immediately slowed to a walk, his front legs cross-stepping over each other. Russell Tarr, the PH, said, “Don’t shoot again! There’s no need,” just as the bull went down. It turned out the .375 bullet, a 300-grain Fail Safe, had done its job perfectly, penetrating both lungs and leaving a fist-sized exit through the far ribs, so the buffalo wouldn’t have lived long. But I was vastly impressed with how much harder the .416 Rigby seemed to hit, and the almost immediate end to everything afterward. The 400-grain Nosler Partition had en-tered through the short ribs on the left side, clipping the front edge of the paunch before messing up both lungs and the big blood vessels on top of the heart. It stopped after cracking the right shoulder, retaining 83% of its weight. Since then the .416 has taken two other buffalo, a bull water buffalo in in South Texas and another Cape buffalo in Tanzania. Apparently all the rifle does is shoot wild buffalo—though not American bison. I’ve used a scope about half the time, but mostly to test scopes, not because of any real need. With 100 grains of Ramshot Magnun, the rifle groups both soft and solid 400-grain bullets of any make into a 3” circle at 100 yards with the factory express sights, plenty for shooting ani-mals the size of moose at closer ranges. (For those curious about such things, with a scope the accuracy averages a little over an inch with 400-grain Nosler Partitions.) Muzzle velocities range from 2300 to 2450, depending on the bullet, averaging right around the 2370 of most factory ammo. I did experiment with heavier loads a few years ago, finding 400-grain bullets could be safely zipped along at 2650, but since the factory velocity kills buffalo just fine have stuck to the original ballistics in the field. The bolt handle, trigger and safety have now all worked perfectly for a dozen years, despite quite a bit of use in both dusty and rainy conditions. Luke Samaras was the safari outfitter in Tanzania. Luke isn’t as famous as Harry Selby, but he’s one of the leg-endary veterans of the East African safari business. Like Sel-by, he started his career as a PH in Kenya and Tanzania in the days when a typical safari lasted over a month while wander-ing around both countries. While many hunters are aware that Kenya closed down all big game safaris in 1977, Tanzania also closed hunting for a few years in the 1970’s, and Luke found himself without a job. Luckily, one of his clients was Paul Rob-erts, who said he could come to work at Rigby, so Luke to Lon-don until hunting opened up in Tanzania again. About 20 years ago another client who’d hunted with Luke several times said he wanted a genuine Rigby rifle, and decided to have them build Luke one too. Luke had hunted dangerous game with a variety of rifles and cartridges over the years, including some nice doubles. After thinking about it a while, he decided on a bolt-action .416 Rigby. I learned about all this during several interesting con-versations with Luke in his Selous Reserve camp. He’d made some comment on my CZ during sight-in on the first day, but

I didn’t realize that he preferred a bolt-action .416 Rigby as his all-around backup rifle until near the end of the safari. He prefers the .416’s finer accuracy and flatter trajectory to the big-bore doubles, just in case some wounded animal has to be shot well beyond 100 yards. He also says it has plenty of stopping power for elephant (his favorite big game), even in the very thick cover they’re usually hunted in today, yet unlike the .416 Remington or most other “modern” rounds, the pressures are low enough not to cause problems when hunting at 100+ de-grees. His Rigby is a little fancier than Harry Selby’s, and much fancier than my CZ, but all three are built along the same basic plan. To be honest, I initially bought my CZ almost purely for romantic reasons. After all, very few modern safari hunters get to use enough different rifles on various kinds of danger-ous African game to develop a valid idea of what works best. I certainly will not, and while big double rifles have tempted me a few times, even a “reasonably” priced big-bore double costs as much as another safari. Discovering Luke Samaras felt just as strongly about the .416 Rigby as Harry Selby made me feel quite lucky: My emotional purchase of a dozen years ago had also turned out to be rational! That happens now than then with rifle loonies, though it’s certainly the exception rather than the rule Now I just have to figure out how to hunt more buffalo, whether in Africa or Australia, the only place I’ve always want-ed to hunt and haven’t. Maybe next year!

Where Else Are They Now? John is presently appearing in every issue of Guns, Handloader, Rifle, Sports Afield and Varmint Hunter; frequently in American Hunter, American Rifleman and Successful Hunter, and frequently logs onto the ‘ask the gunwriters’ forum at www.24hourcampfire.com. Eileen writes hunting stories, too, but her big gig is wild game prep and cooking. Sausage Season is her latest work, but she’s also writing for Vamint Hunter magazine and appears 4 times a year as a guest game cooking columnist for the Out-door News.

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The Back BurnerRevelations From ReadersJB Sometime in the late 1980’s I wrote an ar-ticle for Field & Stream about hunting western riv-erbottoms for whitetails, and included one example of a friend who often used a canoe to access chunks of public land during deer season. One November while he canoed down the Big Hole River a big buck chased a doe across the river. In autumn that part of the Big Hole isn’t very deep, and by the time my friend got the canoe pointed the right way and lift-ed his .30-06, the buck was splash-ing through the shallows—where it dropped to a 180-grain bullet. An upstate New York reader angrily wrote to the editors, saying that shooting animals in the water was not only immoral, but illegal. New York’s game laws outlawed “hunters” from used dogs or even fire to push deer into lakes, where they could be speared by “hunters” in canoes, apparently because of prac-tices common back in colonial days. But when I called the local information officer for the Montana Department of Fish and Wildlife, a guy I knew pretty well, he said there wasn’t any such statute in Mon-tana. He also said, “John, you don’t have to respond to every nut case in the world,” but I was young and always did like to debate. After thinking about it a little, I realized Mon-tana probably didn’t outlaw shooting swimming deer because of our relative lack of lakes. Instead early Montanans, such as the Blackfeet, herded bison over our abundant cliffs, and when Lewis and Clark and fur trappers came along they simply shot animals, instead of forcing them to swim for their lives. Be-

sides, the deer hadn’t been swimming, so I wrote back pointing that out. He wrote to me, saying it was in the river, wasn’t it? I responded by saying rivers aren’t built like swimming pools, with vertical walls, and if he considered a buck running through shin-deep water to be “swimming” then perhaps he’d never learned to swim. When he wrote back I remembered the advice

of my info-officer friend, and tossed the unopened enve-lope into my office wastepaper basket. Some other correspondence has been highly tech-nical, such as the guy in Alaska who complained to Han-dloader magazine about my statement that all the powder that’s going to burn in a centerfire rifle

barrel does so within a few inches of the chamber. Please note “going to burn.” When smokeless pow-der burns at the pressure it’s designed for, very few unburned granules make it more than 2-3 inches down the bore. If a lot of unburned powder blows out the muzzle, it means the pressure’s too low for the powder to burn well. The guy took exception to this, and Han-dloader forwarded his letter to me. I wrote back, explaining the facts, which have been proven over and over again by noted ballisticians such as Homer Powley. A response from Alaska showed up quickly, for snail-mail, saying he got a moose every year. I wrote back, congratulating him on his success. He responded by saying he not only got a moose every year, but had some great recipes for grilling moose meat that “everybody” liked. Ah, now I got his point! Killing and cooking moose meant he

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knew all about internal ballistics. So I wrote back, asking him to please provide info about powder in-stead of moose. He responded by stating that a .30-06 case filled with IMR3031 propels a 150-grain bul-let much faster than a .30-06 case full of IMR4350, so obviously all the IMR3031 is burning and the IMR4350 isn’t. This time I did some reading and testing be-fore responding, saying I’d found a Federal .30-06 case could hold about 61.5 grains of IMR3031, but most .30-06 handloading data shows a maximum charge of around 46-47 grains with a 150-grain bul-let. According to pressure-tested data and one of Homer Powley’s formulas, this meant the resulting pressure of a 61.5 grain charge would be 85-90,000 psi. Did his rifle show any signs of excessive pres-sures when he fired this “proof” of my ignorance? When an envelope from Alaska appeared a few days later it was also “round-filed,” something that again proved really satisfying. Recently I received a letter about one of my handloading columns in Guns magazine on mak-ing accurate handgun ammo. Among my sugges-tions was to trim rimless cases for semi-autos to the same length, since they headspace on the mouth of the case, resulting in more consistent ignition. I also noted some pistols shoot better with their cases trimmed to a slightly shorter length than the factory maximum. Guns is an enlightened magazine that doesn’t require all staff workers to appear each day in the head office in San Diego. In fact many live in other places, which works fine, due to the instant transmis-sion of words and photos through cyberspace. This makes it possible for people who really like to shoot (something difficult to accomplish near major cities) to live in more rural areas. The editor lives in a much smaller town in Nevada, so it’s easy to shoot when-ever he wants to. The letter bypassed him and came to me directly from the office in San Diego. It was semi-legibly printed in ball-point pen on yellow legal-pad paper, and the guy started by saying his father had “PROVED” rimless handgun cartridges don’t headspace on the case mouth. This got my attention, since the Sporting Arms and Am-munition Manufacturers’ Institute (SAAMI) sets case and chamber standards so factory ammo func-tions correctly in all factory firearms chambered for that round. SAAMI’s specifications show all rimless handgun rounds headspacing on the case mouth. If

this was a mistake I thought SAAMI would appreci-ate knowing about it, so I manfully deciphered the rest of the letter. For three rambling pages the guy explained how rimless handgun cases actually headspace on the extractor groove and (more importantly) the seated bullet. I thought this was very interesting, since the seating depth of the bullets in the factory 9mm Para-bellum, .40 S&W and .45 ACP ammo I had on hand varies a little, and even the extractor grooves aren’t exactly alike. But hey, this guy’s father PROVED all this years ago. Since the letter writer admitted to being 74, I suspected his father might have passed on and didn’t want to argue with a dead guy. So I e-mailed the editor of Guns, who coincidentally had just finished responding to another reader who’d had a serious incident (often called a “kaboom”) with .40 S&W ammunition in a 10mm Auto handgun, because somebody had told him rimless handgun cases head-space on the extractor groove. I asked the editor if he wanted to see my guy’s letter, and he suggested I round-file it. In an Internet question-and-answer column I once wrote, a guy said he was really tired of trim-ming every .223 Remington case he reloaded for prairie dog shooting. I suggested he pre-set his dial caliper to the maximum SAAMI overall length for .223 cases, using it as a “snap gauge” to quickly sort the cases, trimming only the too-long cases. Another reader saw my response, and im-mediately accused me of the “abuse of a precision measuring instrument.” He said if that’s the way I treated all my reloading tools, why should anybody pay attention to my advice? A “snap gauge” is a piece of sheet steel with the maximum dimensions of certain parts machined into the steel. You stick a bolt or flange or cartridge case into the gauge, and if the piece fits, it’s good to go. Snap gauges with the maximum lengths of a few dozen common cartridge cases used to be a standard piece of equipment in every reloading room, and Ly-man still offers their E-Zee Case Length Gage II, al-lowing “the reloader to sort cases quickly, accurately and easily to determine if cases are over maximum SAAMI specification.” Back when I started seriously handloading in the early 1970’s a cartridge-case snap gauge pro-vided an affordable alternative to a steel caliper. The 1972 edition of Handloader’s Digest shows a Hert-

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er’s snap-gauge for $3.19, while the cheapest dial caliper is listed at $23.70. Today, however, the retail price of the E-Zee Gage II is around $18, and Chi-nese factories crank out stainless-steel calipers that sell over here for around $20. To be honest, I’m surprised Lyman still offers the E-Zee, since I don’t know any handloader much under 50 years old who owns one. Apparently the guy who took offense at my “abuse” of a caliper didn’t ei-ther, so had no idea what snap-gauge meant, assumed “snap” had some sinister meaning. I didn’t want to get hauled in for extreme cruelty to measuring tools, so patiently explained the technique, whereupon the guy responded, “Oh, okay,” and went away. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for Han-dloader about reloading the .303 British using two rifles to test various loads, my late uncle Larry’s No. 4 Mark 1 that he picked out of a barrel of similarly “sporterized” Lee-Enfields in a Montana hardware store in the 1960’s, and a new Ruger No. 1A I’d pur-chased at Capital Sports & Western Wear in Helena, Montana. Both rifles shot pretty well, but some loads went under an inch from the Ruger, thanks to using a scope instead of the battle sights on the Lee-Enfield. In the article I mentioned slugging both ri-fle’s bores. The bore of the Ruger barrel measured the standard .303” but the grooves measured .313”, a little over the nominal .311-.312. Well, an expert handloader from somewhere pounced on that, send-ing an irate e-mail to Wolfe Publishing saying I was obviously lying about the accuracy of the No. 1 to please their advertisers, since “over-sized” rifle bar-rels couldn’t shoot groups under an inch at 100 yards. As a result he wanted a refund on his subscription. Handloader’s editor told the guy that Ruger hadn’t advertised in the magazine for several years, then forwarded the e-mail to me for further response. One satisfying aspect of snail-mail is being able to write the letter, then let it sit a while, since it can’t be instantly zapped anywhere in the world. I’ve torn up or round-filed a few of my paper responses over the years, and you probably have too, but with e-mail you can hit “send” before really thinking it over. In this instance I did think about possible responses for, oh, 2-3 minutes, including having my friend Jay (who was standing behind the spotting scope while I shot the groups) write a notarized letter to send the guy about the No. 1’s accuracy. I also thought about explaining the realities of accuracy and bore and groove diameters to the guy,

one of those experts who had no clue what he was talking about. While a bullet of exact groove diam-eter tends to shoot most accurately, this doesn’t mean a barrel with deeper grooves won’t shoot accurately. The most important interior dimension of a rifle’s barrel is the bore diameter, and examples are common. Shooters who’ve fooled around with a Savage 99 chambered for the .22 High Power usually find .224” bullets shoot very well, in fact they often shoot more accurately than the .227” 70-grain Hor-nady bullet matching the nominal groove diameter of the High Power. The reason is simple: The Hornady is actually designed for European 5.6x52R rifles. It uses exactly the same case as the .22 High Power, but the rifling twist in European single-shots and drillings is nor-mally one turn in 10 inches, while the twist in Savage 99’s is supposedly 1-12. (I say supposedly, because the old 99’s were rifled on sine-bar machines, where twist could be varied by adjusting the machine. If the machine was adjusted on a Monday, the twist might not be exact on Friday. I once owned an old 99 in .250-3000 with a 1-15 twist, rather than the supposed standard 1-14—and it wouldn’t shoot any100-grain bullet worth a hoot.) Many shooters who start handloading for a 99 in .22 High Power often become frustrated when the “correct” Hornady bullet doesn’t group very well, blaming it on the rifle. But the truth is that Hornady’s bullet is a little too long to stabilize in a 1-12 twist, and .224” bullets in the 55-60 grain class normally shoot quite well in the same rifles. I’ve loaded for two .22 High Powers and both refused to shoot the 70-grain Hornady under 3-5” at 100 yards, while 60-grain .224’s from both Hornady and Nosler grouped 2” or less—with iron sights. (If you don’t believe me, reread Ken Waters’ old Handloader ar-ticle on the .22 High Power, the place I found out about all this.) There are other examples of jacketed bullets well under groove diameter shooting accurately. In fact many .303 British rifles will shoot .308” bul-lets pretty well, and most .35 caliber rifles will shoot jacketed .357” pistol bullets. But no, this guy knew my groups with the “over-sized” Ruger .303 British barrel had to be fiction. I thought about all this, then hit the delete but-ton. It wasn’t quite as satisfying as Frisbeeing a busi-ness envelope toward the round file, but it worked.