mc, When I was a kid, I ask every hunter in our area questions like, how many rifles have you used on deer, what is your favorite rifle, if you were buying again what rifle would you buy, how many deer have you shot?
?? I pestered eveyone who hunted and shot... Learned some things too. Most hunters would buy a gun different from what they had, and most did not KNOW how many deer they had shot..Only two guys out of maybe a 50 - 100 fellows I must have ask, knew their totals. One guy had shot 13 bucks. With things like the 30-40, 30-30, and 43 Egyptian (?) He was pretty old, I would say in his 70's, (to a kid that's old, ain't so old now). Another fellow said he had shot 28. He used a model 94 30-30.. In those days deer were not plentiful, and one had to travel quite a ways to find any huntable numbers.. My grandfather said he had shot a lot of deer, but he had no idea how many... He was the only one out of all the hunters that said he would buy a rifle like he had...It was a mod. 54 Win. 30-06.... My cousins went for the 284 model 99 in a big way when it hit the market. Most of them had been .300 Sav. shooters.. In that country, most guys said they wanted an all round caliber something to shoot woodchucks in the summer and deer in the fall. The old .30-06 was the number one choice , with the .270 a close second. No one mentioned the .243, 250 Sav. or .257 Roberts. One farmer did use a Savage 340 in .222 for chucks and deer. One other question I remember asking was if they used a scope and what kind and power. Most did not use scopes. I had a couple cousins that had the old Balvar 2.5-8 on model 99's and a 30-06 pump. They encourged me to get a scope, then I fell in with a gunsmith a few miles from home. He was a super shot, Camp Perry shooter, stockmaker, excellent hunter, and into long range shooting. The rest is history...Lots of money down the tube for guns, bullets, powder, primers, scopes, what have you..It has been fun and won't change a thing except if I were able to go back to high school I would skip everyday of deer season and hunt. They never failed my buddies who did. I did keep pretty good records of most of the game I have taken....
