By Philip Bourjaily

When I was in Texas in April, my friend Chris Paradise of Mossy Oak he showed me his secret weapon. This has to be the ultimate strutter decoy, as it’s made from a real gobbler he shot and had mounted. Obviously this is not a decoy I would set up in my home public turkey woods, but Paradise uses this it on secure private land. It’s very light, and as you can sort of see in the picture, the feathers move naturally in the wind. Real feathers have a sheen that no plastic or vinyl decoy can match.

Gobblers attack this decoy and it is kind of fragile. Therefore if you hunt with Chris you have to follow one rule: the shooter has the decoy’s back. There is no sitting and watching the show when a gobbler comes in looking to fight. You pull the trigger before the tom starts pecking, spurring and beating on the stuffer so it can survive to fool another turkey on another day.

By Philip Bourjaily

One of the other guests in the Texas turkey camp where I hunted was singer Darryl Worley, who brought his guitar and did some picking at night.

Besides being a nice guy, being a genuine authority on coon hunting and catfishing, and having several hit records, Worley is devoted to entertaining our men and women in uniform. His next stop after Texas was South Korea, as seen in the video below.

By David E. Petzal

On my legendary, almost mythical, nilgai hunt, I had the near-orgasmic pleasure of hunting with a McMillan Custom Collection rifle. McMillan is best known for making synthetic stocks that are the gold standard for that art form, but the McMillan family has, since the 60s, produced top-grade competition, tactical, and hunting rifles as well.

The Custom Collection consists of eight big-game rifles in varying configurations that use McMillan’s G30 bolt action (made in both controlled-round and push-feed versions), Lilja or Schneider barrels, Jewell triggers, and of course their own stocks. I had the chance to shoot four of the Custom Collection models ranging from .270 WSM to .338 Lapua, and can tell you that they are as fine and as accurate as anything you can get.

By David E. Petzal

A blogger of my acquaintance asked me to explain the difference between controlled-feed bolt-actions and push-feed bolt actions, and the importance thereof to shooters.

Controlled feed refers to the system developed by Peter Paul Mauser for his Model 98 bolt-action. When the bolt is cycled, a cartridge rises up from the magazine and the extractor—that long, flat piece of metal that rides alongside the bolt—snaps onto the rim of the cartridge and holds it in a death grip on its trip into the chamber. When the round is fired, it pulls the case clear until it is kicked out of action by the ejector, a small, unattractive piece of steel that is fixed in place behind the follower and rides through a slot in the bolt face. So, controlled feed: Each round is held in place throughout the firing cycle.

Push feed was introduced by Remington in 1949 in the Model 721 (which eventually became the Model 700). Here, as a cartridge rose up out of the magazine, the bolt simply pushed it forward into the chamber without holding on to it. As the case chambers, a small unattractive clip snaps onto the rim, and pulls the case out when the round is fired. The shell is kicked clear by a spring-loaded plunger in the bolt face.