I was

wrong,

wrong, the dry aspen leads underfoot were noisy to walk in,

and the elk bugle that I'd sidetracked to check out

had been squeaky and immature sounding. My gut told me that I should

be pressing on up the ridge in pursuit of the harem of cows with a gnarly sounding bull tending

them. My gut was wrong. The bull that flushed from nearly beneath my

feet where he'd laid down and held tight in a tangle of boulders was the biggest I'd ever put crosshairs on.

With a single best shot of my life, I broke both of his shoulders on the run from about

70 yards as he flickered off through the trees.

Now this was a DIY public land hunt and the bull that fell on that quiet mountain

side was a monster, non-typ.

Not the numbers matter all that much,

but he later stretched the tape to 402 inches,

as scored by an official Boone and crockett scorer.

Now although we Western hunters put a lot of emphasis on being able to shoot

lethally out past 400 yards and rightly so the fact is that a lot of our shots are inside

a hundred yards more importantly a lot of shots across the nation and around the

world are predictably close because the train

being hunted in isn't open enough to take long shots. So today we're going to talk

about cartridges, bullets, and rifles, ideal for authoritatively dropping big game up close.

But first, let's go to our upfront Q&A section, and this time it's brought to you by Porter's Pond, who we usually create a

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