After trying both the 140 grain Sierra and the 130 grain TSX, I decided that I needed something in the middle. Ideally, a bullet that would hold together better than the Sierra, but that was soft enough to expand at the lower impact velocity of a longer range shot. With that in mind, I decided to try the 130 grain Nosler Accubond. I also bought a bag of Norma .270 WSM brass which replaced the Winchester brass I had been using and switched to a Federal 210 primer. My hope was that going with a standard rifle primer versus a magnum might give me a little less pressure while still giving consistent ignition and velocity. It turns out, I was right! Using Retumbo and loading the cartridges to an OAL of 3.132 inches, I got the following results:

62 gr – 3284, 3267, 3228 – group size 1.2 inches
63 gr – 3292, 3286, 3280 – group size .7 inches
64 gr – 3300, 3315, 3300 – group size 1 inch
65 gr – 3308, 3325, 3325 – group size 1.1 inches

None of these loads showed signs of excessive pressure. While I don’t claim to be an expert, I think that going from a magnum to a standard rifle primer made a lot of difference. I decided to go with the 63 grain load, now it was time to try it on game and see how the bullet performed.

The first animal I took with it was a whitetail buck. He was broadside at 350 yards. The bullet passed completely through, taking out the top of the heart. At the shot, the deer reared up on his hind legs and fell over backwards. Since it was a pass-through, I have no idea how much weight the bullet retained, but the exit wound was about the size of a dime.

The next day, I wanted to shoot a doe for some extra meat. I spotted a nice one at the edge of the woods at 250 yards. She was quartering away at about 45 degrees, so I held for the offside shoulder and squeezed. She ran about 25 yards and piled up. When I got up to her, there was no exit wound, but she did have a bump under her skin on her offside shoulder. After making a small cut, the bullet popped out.

It was a nice day and I had plenty of time, so I did a little digging in the gut pile after I dressed her out. The bullet entered her flank, went though her stomach, tore out a big piece of liver and went through most of the front shoulder, but didn’t hit the main joint.

The recovered bullet weighed 81.6 grains, which is 62.7% of the original weight. The total penetration was somewhere between 1.5 and 2 feet.

Years ago I was dating a young, very pretty, very girly, city-girl named Jordan. We had been seeing each other for about four or five months, when one night she told me that she was interested in trying hunting. She only said it in passing, but my mind immediately started planning out how to introduce her to my favorite pastime.

With our six month anniversary coming up, I had to act fast. I was in a local sporting goods store looking for a rifle for her and noticed that they had a Remington Model 7 Youth Model in .260 Remington on the clearance rack. I bought the rifle along with a 3-9 Leupold and gave it to her as a gift to celebrate our six-month anniversary. (I also gave her diamond necklace to make sure that I didn’t end up sleeping on the couch for a few weeks.)

Over the next couple of months, I started teaching her how to shoot with my old Daisy BB gun. While she wasn’t Annie Oakley, she did OK with it. After she got comfortable shooting the BB gun, we moved up to a .22 rimfire, which gave her a chance to start using a scope. I developed a nice mild load for her .260 using a 120 ballistic tip. After thinking about it, I decided not to have her practice with the .260. Her form with the .22 looked great, and I didn’t want her to develop a flinch. I just told her that the .260 worked exactly like the .22 and she didn’t need to bother practicing with it.

Where I hunt in Minnesota, the deer are very plentiful. This is where I fill my freezers with venison every fall. Most years, I have all of my tags filled in the first half hour of the season. I had a stand that overlooked a small clearing that I hunt on opening morning every year. Unfortunately, this stand wasn’t big enough for two people, so two weeks before the season I drove up north with $300 worth of lumber and built a stand for the two of us to use, complete with walls, a roof and a nice bench.

Jordan worked as a bar maid in a German bar in Minneapolis and had to work until close the night before opener. To get to our hunting property from where I lived was about a three hour drive, so I picked her up from work at 2AM and drove through the night to get us there by first light. As we drove through the snow, I was both excited and apprehensive. I really wanted to make sure that she had a positive experience. I hoped she wouldn’t get bored, cold or feel bad about shooting a deer. While this was just another weekend adventure to her, it meant a lot more to me.

She was sound asleep when we arrived at our hunting shack. I gently shook her awake and told her that we needed to go. When I opened the door of my truck, I was hit by a blast of very cold air. It had stopped snowing and cleared up, but the temperature was dropping. She didn’t say much as we got our gear together. I don’t know if she was just tired or nervous.

I love sitting in my deer stand waiting for the sun to come up. This was actually the first time I’d ever shared a stand with another person. As we sat there in the moonlight, we could hear deer moving around in the woods; the leaves crunching beneath their feet as they fed on acorns. The deer kept on getting closer and closer. While I couldn’t see them, I knew that they were within a couple hundred yards of us.

Crunch
Crunch
Crunch

Something changed. Instead of the sound of deer meandering around, it sounded like they were all moving on one direction. Checking my watch, it was three minutes before legal shooting light.

“Get ready,” I whispered. “They’re coming.” Jordan picked up her rifle, rested in on the wall of the stand for support and peered through her scope.

“I don’t see any,” she said. “Just wait, they’re coming.”

Then I saw the first deer, a doe. She was walking down the trail about thirty yards in front of us. “I see one!” she whispered. “Don’t shoot, it’s a doe.” I whispered back. Behind that doe came another , and another, another. In all, ten deer walked right in front of us in a single line. None of them had horns. As they passed by, I thought I could hear one more following them.

“Just wait, I think they’re might be a buck following them,” I whispered to her. As I peered into the woods, I saw another deer. It was big bodied and following the same trail the does had been on with its nose to the ground.

“That’s the buck. Shoot him when he’s right in front of us.”

As the deer got closer and closer, I strained to see its antlers. When it was finally right in front of us, I realized that it wasn’t a buck, just a very big doe.

“Wait!” I hissed right as she squeezed the trigger. At the shot, the deer dropped in its tracks.

“Shit, that wasn’t a buck.” I said to her. “It’s ok though, I have a doe permit we can use on her. Good shot honey!”

“Is it dead?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s dead. You center-punched it.”

“That’s good. I was afraid it might suffer.”

“Nope, you killed her dead on the spot.”

As we were talking about how dead the deer was, I saw its leg twitch.

“It’s moving,” she said.

“Yeah, sometimes they twitch a little after they’re dead. It’s no big deal.”

No sooner had I said this when the doe raised its head. A second later she hauled herself up with her front legs, her back legs dragging as she started pulling herself away from us. Grabbing the rifle out of Jordan’s hands, I centered the crosshairs on the doe’s neck and squeezed the trigger. At the shot, she went down again.

“Is it dead now?” she asked me.

“Yup. Now she’s dead.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah. Your first shot was a little high. You hit her through the spine. She’s dead now though.”

As I sat there hoping that Jordan wasn’t too traumatized at my having to shoot her deer again, I saw it’s leg twitch.

“Oh, shit.” I thought to myself. “Please be dead.”

It wasn’t.

And it proved that it wasn’t as it started bleating. Very few things sound worse than a dying deer. It almost sounds like a baby crying.

Jacking a fresh shell into the rifle, I realized that the only shot that I had would be right through the head. My mind started racing. “OK, first the deer gets up and I shoot it again. No problem. Now is laying there bleating, and if I shoot it in the head, its head is going to explode. She’s going to be so traumatized that she’s never going to want to go hunting again.”

Time to make a plan.

As fast I could, I climbed down out of the stand and ran over to the downed deer. I had my .44 in a shoulder holster, which I quickly drew and fired a round into the deer’s heart from about three feet away. The bleating stopped.

As I got back into the stand, I just about wanted to cry. I felt horrible for the way we’d killed that deer. Granted, it was a better death than Mother Nature ever gives a deer, but it was still not very pleasant.

“Is it dead now?” Jordan asked, looking straight into my eyes.

“Unequivocally, yes,” I said looking right back at her.

“That’s good,” she said. With that, she leaned her rifle in the corner, leaned her head against my shoulder and went to sleep.

“Huh, that’s interesting,” I thought to myself. “She should be crying her eyes out right now.”

A couple of hours later my dad showed up to see how we did.

“You guys sure did a lot of shooting this morning,” he said as he walked up. “Did you get anything?” Without a word I pointed in front of us.

We got out of the stand and walked up to where it was laying. As the three of us looked at the dead deer, the first words out of Jordan’s mouth were “Wow, they have really pretty eyes.”
I thought about the look in those eyes as I had fired the last round into it from point blank range. “Don’t tell me how pretty their eyes are,” I replied rather crossly. “Let’s get her dressed out.”

My dad is a doctor and always used to give my brothers and I anatomy lessons when we’d clean game. Since this was Jordan’s first deer, he did the same with her. She seemed fascinated by all of the different parts of the gut pile, and even got some blood under her manicured nails as she helped me with field dressing.

As we were driving home that night, I had to ask her. “So what did you think of deer hunting?”

“Well, deer hunting kind of sucks. It’s really cold, kind of boring and you have to get up early. But shooting deer is fun!”

“I thought that you’d probably cry when we killed the deer,” I said. “I cried when I shot my first deer.”

“Why?” she asked, truly puzzled.

I should have taken it as a sign right there. In the end, she ended up showing me even less compassion than that deer!

The next bullet I tried was the Berger VLD. All loads used Winchester cases, Federal 215 primers and RL25. All cartridges were loaded to a C.O.L of 2.955 inches. Starting at 60 grains of powder, I had the following results:

60 gr – 3058, 3086, 3065. Group size was 1.2 inches
61 gr – 3072, 3108, 3100. Group size was 1.6 inches
61.5 gr – 3115, 3100, 3100. Group size was .7 inches
62 gr – 3137, 3167, 3182. Group size was 2 inches
62.5 gr – 3205, 3197, 3159. Group size was 1 inch
63 gr – 3220, 3236, 3220. Group size was 2 inches

At 63 gr, pressure once again became an issue, so I stopped there.

With the Berger not delivering the accuracy or velocity I was looking for, I tried the 140 gr Sierra Gameking with the same components.

61 gr – 3145, 3167, 3155. Group size 1 inch.
62 gr – 3267, 3292, 3308. Group size .8 inches.
63 gr – 3300, 3333, 3333. Group size 1.5 inches.

At 63 grains, the last round blew primer.

With a coues deer hunt scheduled in Mexico, I loaded up a batch of the 140 gr Gamekings with 62 grains of powder and headed south.

On the fourth day of the trip, I found a nice 3X3. After missing him at 315 yards, I finally sealed the deal, hitting him not once, not twice, but three times at 435 yards. How that little deer took all those shots is beyond me. Even at that range, the damage done by that soft of a bullet was significant. All three bullets passed through with large exit wounds. There wasn’t much left of the cape…

Most of us learn how to hunt and fish from our fathers. As children, our fathers are bigger than life. When I was little, I knew my dad was the best outdoorsman in the world. He knew everything there was to know about guns, tree stands, calling ducks, catching walleyes and gutting deer.

In one of my earliest memories, my dad and I are walking by the National Guard tent at the county fair on a crisp August night. To get people to stop, they have an airgun range with moving targets set up. “Hey Doc, let’s see how you can shoot!” one of the soldiers calls out as we walk by. “I’m not joining the Guard,” my dad responds. “I’m too old.” This resulted in laughs all around. I have no idea who these men in camouflage uniforms are, but it’s obvious my dad does. Soon they’re needling him for free medical advice, information on where the walleyes are biting and what his plans are for deer season. As I listen to the conversations of men, I finally can’t contain myself. “Dad, shoot the gun!” I whisper as I tug on his hand.

One of the soldiers hands my dad the air rifle and says with a smile, “This is the end the bullet comes out of.” This gets a round of laughs from everyone around. As the target moves down the track, he shoulders the rifle and there is a light pop as he squeezes the trigger. When the target is returned, there is a small hole through the bullseye. “Lucky shot,” the soldier says putting the target back on the track. “Let’s see you do that again.” Three more times the target goes back and forth in front of us. Each time, there is a small pop as the gun goes off. When the target is returned, all of the shots are in a tight cluster in the center. “That’s the best shooting we’ve seen all night,” the soldier comments as my dad hands him the rifle. Of course it is, I think to myself. My dad is the best shot in the world!

As I got older, I started accompanying my dad and older brothers on hunting trips. We hunted waterfowl in North Dakota and Manitoba, Pheasants in South Dakota and deer in our home state of Minnesota. He taught me everything he knew about calling ducks, driving a slough for pheasants, training dogs and finding the best place to put a deer stand. As I got older, my hunting interests started expanding beyond my father’s. We always subscribed to Outdoor Life, Minnesota Sportsman and Field and Stream. I read each of these magazines from cover to cover soaking up every bit of information I could.

For the past twenty years, my family has made an annual trip to northern Minnesota for the opener of the firearms deer season. While we’ve never had much luck finding trophy animals on the land we hunt, the deer are plentiful. In the years when I was starting out my professional career and my brothers were in medical school or residency, deer opener was one of the few “guy weekends” we spent together.

As my brothers started their own families and I found myself more and more focused on my career, I realized that the time we spent hunting together was some of the best family time we had and we needed to start doing more of it. Five years ago, I met a rancher in SE Montana who has some prime hunting land on the Little Powder River. We soon developed a friendship and an annual trip or two to hunt deer and antelope have become part of my normal hunting season. Three years ago, I asked him if he would mind if I brought my dad with me to hunt. He didn’t have any objections, so the following year my dad and I put in for antelope licenses.

To get ready for the trip, I bought him a new bolt-action rifle and binoculars. I carefully developed loads for the rifle and sighted it in at 250 yards. After all these years, this was going to be my chance to teach my father a new way to hunt, as he had never hunted big game outside of the Minnesota woods and always from a stand.

October found us with a twelve-hour drive in front of us and gave us a good chance to get caught up. Over the past few years, we haven’t had a lot of one on one time with each other. While Dad’s in his seventies, he’s always been young for his age. He’s in great health and very active, but listening to him talk about life and the world, it was clear that his perspective on things had changed. In some ways he was more opinionated, in others more reflective. His pride in “his boys” and what they had accomplished was very clear, but there was also a twinge of his own mortality in his words. For the first time, I realized that the number of days I have to hunt with my dad is fixed, and one day I’ll use the last one.

On our first day of hunting we slept in, still a little tired from the long drive the day before. We grabbed an ample breakfast of eggs, pancakes, bacon and thick, black coffee at the local truck stop then drove out to the ranch. Within minutes, we spotted our first herd of antelope. “Do you see one you like?” I asked as we glassed the herd of about twenty animals. A lone buck looked back at us from the group of does. My dad said that he thought the buck looked good, but after looking at him some more, I thought we could do better. Besides, it was a warm, sunny fall day and I wasn’t ready for his hunt to be over so soon.

As we drove the ranch roads, we stopped and glassed several more herds. All of the herds had one or two bucks in them and all of them were about the same size. My dad has never been much of a trophy hunter, so he was getting a little frustrated with me for not letting him shoot one of them. “I think we should go back and shoot that first buck,” he said as we sat on the tailgate of my truck eating our lunch.

When we returned to the spot where we had seen the first buck, we found that the herd had moved further back into a series of draws. “That’s good,” I said. “It’ll be easier to sneak up on them.” Using the contours of the land for cover, we were soon within about 200 yards of the herd. “We can’t get any closer. You’re going to have to shoot from here,” I told him as I pulled out my rangefinder. “They’re smaller than deer and a lot closer than they look. Hold dead-on for his heart.”

As I watched through my binoculars, he squeezed off the first shot. The buck’s head snapped to attention and he stared right at us as in ones and twos, the does started running up the draw. Another shot rang out. This time I saw dust fly on the hillside far behind the buck. At the shot, he took off with the rest of the herd for parts unknown.

“I think you shot over him. I know you didn’t hit him,” I said as I watched the antelope go over the crest of the hill. “No biggie, there are a lot more.”

As we walked back to the truck, we discussed the shot. In all the years we’ve hunted together, I can only think of a one or two times where my dad had missed a deer. We both decided that it was just because he wasn’t used to shooting at antelope and wasn’t used to shooting his new rifle yet.

Over the next few hours, the scene replayed itself several times. Each time, I would get us into place within what I had thought was easy shooting distance, which would be followed by one or two misses. The sun was starting to set when we pulled into the last section of the ranch we hadn’t hunted yet. As we came over the crest of a hill, we spotted a lone antelope on top of the next ridge. A quick glance through the binoculars showed that he was a mature buck. Normally, I would have just set up for the shot from where we were stopped. But given the difficulties we’d had earlier in the day, I wanted get us as close as possible.

The plan was simple. This was the opening day of the season and this antelope probably hadn’t been shot at yet. Trucks are a common sight to the animals and at this point in the year, I didn’t think that he would see the truck as a threat. “Dad, I’m going to drive right up to that antelope. When I get about a hundred yards from him, I’m going to turn the truck broadside to him and stop. Then, you get out and shoot him.”

The plan worked like a charm. I drove straight at him until we were a hundred yards away, then turned the truck broadside and cut the engine. Dad got out, leaned over the hood and squeezed off a round at the curious antelope. At the shot, he turned and walked over the crest of the hill.

It took a couple of seconds for me to realize that he had missed again. Filled with a combination of frustration and disbelief, I jumped out of the truck and motioned for him to follow me as I started jogging up the side of the hill.

Reaching the top of the hill, we quickly spotted the buck in a small wash at the bottom of the hill. “That’s him,” I said pointing. Dad extended the legs on the bipod on his rifle and took aim. The rifle went off, shattering the silence of the evening. At the shot, the antelope looked up at us, but didn’t move. Another shot, and still the antelope stood staring up at us.

“That’s it,” I thought to myself. “We’ve spooked every antelope on the ranch and still haven’t killed anything. I’m going to go back to the truck, get my rifle, and shot the S.O.B. myself.” As I turned to start back to the truck, I saw the antelope slowly walking away from us. I was about half way back when another shot rang out, this one followed by a loud slap of a bullet hitting meat. “Finally,” I yelled out and looked up to the sky for a quick moment of thanks.

When I got back over to my dad, I saw the antelope laying dead a long way from the wash. “You got him,” I said with a big smile on my face. “Yeah, I finally just aimed right for his heart and it dropped him.” “Where had you been aiming before?” I asked, puzzled. “Well, they looked like they were so far away so I’ve been holding over the top of them. I guess they’re really not that far away.”

Pulling out my rangefinder, I did a quick check on the distance. “That antelope is 315 yards from this spot. Now do you believe me that you can hold dead-on out to 300 yards?”

We walked down the hill in the fading light, the sun painting the landscape in pastel hues of orange and pink. As we admired the fallen antelope, the smell of sage and goat filled our nostrils. “He’s a good one?” dad asks, as he runs his hands over his horns. “Yeah, he’s a good one,” I reply with a smile. “One I’ll never forget.”