Three Rifles You Need

Time Marches On

Fifty+ years later, the brothers were retired and living in Arizona as -40º winters are something you can learn to tolerate but never get used to. A new group of young men had taken over the farms and the jobs. One fellow had two Savage centerfire rifles, a Model 40 in .250 Savage and a Model 99 .300 Savage. Another, who always had to have the newest and latest, had two Winchester 88 rifles, a .243 and a .308. One fellow, a known oddball, had two bolt-action rifles — a Winchester 70 .270 and a Remington 722 in .222 Rem. It goes without saying they each had a .22 rifle.

Seventy years later some things have changed. There are far more rifle models, far more cartridges from which to choose. Frankly I don’t know how youngsters manage. When I was a pre-teen hunting enthusiast in the 1950s it already seemed complicated enough. If you wanted a big game rifle, it would be in .270, .30-’06, .300 Savage or .308. A varmint cartridge would be .22 Hornet, .222 Rem., or for the power-mad a .220 Swift. “Dual-purpose” cartridges like the .243 Win. or .244 Rem. were gaining a lot of interest. Surely they had to be superior to the old .250 Savage — they were newer, after all.

Some things have changed, others are much the same. In North America the game we hunt and the pests after our livestock and gardens haven’t changed much. There may be more elk and fewer mule deer, more coyotes and fewer groundhogs, but generally speaking, it is the same type of shooting challenges