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I'll offer a guess: the rifle which is the most reliable, the rifle you are most familiar with, and the rifle you shoot the best. Hopefully that is the same one.

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Quote: "Something that is not too heavy and can be carried all day on a Mauser 98. A lot of DG rifles have a fair bit of heft to them. I'd give up weight and a little more recoil received for portability and being pointable any day."

At the risk of boring everyone to tears, I will repeat my well worn story. In 1971, when the choice of really effective dangerous games rifles was at perhaps its lowest ebb in 75 years, I took a rifle with me to Africa, built around a cartridge I had developed myself, using a shortened .460 Weatherby case opened up to accept a 570 grain .505 bullet. Ballistically, it mimicked the .500 NE, propelling the bullet at 2150 fps.

The rifle was built on a P14 Enfield action with a Buhmiller barrel and stocked to my specifications by Reinhardt Fajan. It weighed 8 3/4 pounds and came up to my shoulder like a well designed shotgun. This was due, no doubt, to the fact that I used the stock measurements furnished me by Holland & Holland after a day's shooting at their London Shooting School with one of their try guns.

I used the same measurements on my Perazzi Skeet 1 12 gauge, which I used to shoot International Skeet. This is a sport which requires the shooter to call for the bird with the butt stock touching the hip bone, and not raise it until the bird is visible outside the trap house. Since there may be a pause a long as three seconds between the time the bird is called for and when it is actually released, the shooter must react to the bird, instead of vice-versa.

I used a primitive version of a "Lead Sled" to develop loads off the bench and sight in. After that, I seldom fired a full load, using reduced, cast bullet loads to practice with. I expended hundreds of the latter, simply walking around the farm and taking snap shots at targets of opportunity.

In Africa, I fired the rifle over the hood of the hunting car with a folded towel under my shirt to confirm my zero, and then fired shots only "in anger". Firing at an elephant, a rhino or a Cape buffalo I never noticed the recoil and was able to manipulate the bolt fast enough to get three shots into a running rhino and four into a running buffalo. In all, I took three elephants, five buffalo and a rhino with it, and it never let me down.

Here it is, with me and my first elephant:

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