Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

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This whitetail buck can be taken at reasonable range limits, but bullet placement is everything when shooting light rifles.

Glassing a water hole on my friend Randy Routier’s ranch hunting operation at Buffalo, South Dakota, I had been camped out on a ridge top for two days and had been sitting in wait for a good buck to show up with his harem of doe goats. It was well into the first season at this point, and these animals were skittish to say the least. About mid afternoon on the second day of my hunt, 11 goats came walking up a draw and onto the water hole. Seeing no trophy buck in the bunch, I set aside my .25-06, a go-to system for long-range trophy work, and looked down the .223 WSSM at a good-sized (over 100 pounds) goat. The .223 WSSM was loaded with the Barnes 53-grain TSX flatbase at the same velocity as the Swift (3913 f.p.s.) via 40.5 grains of Varget. Aiming again at the point again just behind the left shoulder and a bit high, I caught the doe’s heart and one lung with the Barnes. At the shot my doe just walked off the edge of the stock tank, then proceeded to fall over within about 15 yards. Like the previous .223 WSSM kill, no bullet was recovered. At a range of 125 yards, everything in the bullet department was moving just too fast for the small-frame animal to hold that pill in place.