On my recent trip to Oregon, a bunch of us were sitting on a ridge waiting for a mule deer to do something stupid, and one of our number left to walk down an adjoining ridge. When he was 1,000 yards away or so the head honcho of the ranch said: “You know, I can see him as clearly as if he were wearing blaze orange. That camo of his doesn’t work.”

And it was true. The ridgerunner was wearing some kind of dark camo designed for sitting in a tree in a Southern swamp, and at a distance all the branches and leaves and Spanish moss and  cottonmouths in the pattern blended together into a dark and highly visible mass. I’ve seen this many times; very few camo patterns travel well.

There are three that do, and they work because ...

... none of them look like anything. No trees, no flowers, no chirping birds, no vines, just irregular blobs of color, none very light, and very little black or none at all. The best of these is Cabela’s Oufitter pattern. I’ve worn it in Africa, Alaska, New Zealand, and many places in between and it blends in unfailingly.

The two others are the patterns used by Sleeping Indian and King of the Mountain, who weave it into their wool. I’ve used these from Maine to Montana and they fit right in. Unlike myself.

Both the Army and the Marines have taken these principles to heart—to wit, the Army’s ACU pattern, and the Marines’ MARPAT, which has little globes and anchors blended into the pattern so the jarheads will not be mistaken for soldiers.

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Southpaw Alert! Niles Wheeler of Safari Outfitters (which is high-grade left-hand-gun central) advises me that he has two southpaw Model 70s just in. Both are out of the Winchester Custom Shop, one made in the late 90s, the other in 2001. They are super-fancy rifles, one in .338, the other in .35 Whelen, both in NIB condition. 845-677-5444.

Breaking up is hard to do.—Neil Sedaka, 1962

Changing your mind at this stage of life is a lot harder than breaking up.—David E. Petzal, 2009

Over the past decade and a half I’ve been braying to one and all about the pernicious effect that high-tech gadgetry is having on hunting. Now, however, I think it’s time to re-think things. A couple of weeks ago I went on a mule deer hunt in southeast Oregon, and while I and my rifle made it, my sense of distance did not. For whatever reason I was misjudging ranges by 100 yards or more, even at 300 and under.

What saved me was the fact that I, and everyone else, had a laser rangefinder, and when I got the drop on a 4x5 buck and the laser said 305 yards, I listened to it and not my own inner voice, which is frequently full of s**t anyway.

My rifle was a Mark Bansner .270 WSM, loaded with 150-grain Swift A-Frame bullets at 3,050 fps, and the scope was one of Bushnell’s new 6500 Elite 2.5X-15X rifles with the D.O.A. range-compensating reticle. D.O.A. stands for “dead-on-accurate,” and it is, but only if you know the range. So rather than guess how far it was I sicced high technology on the poor animal, put the 300-yard dot on his ribs, and trust me when I tell you that the bullet went exactly where the dot was.

Not only are the 6500 Elites tougher than Hillary Rodham Clinton, they are extremely bright and sharp. One evening after the sun had set I trained the scope on a herd of deer in a field of pale yellow grass. They were spread out from 630 to 750 yards, and despite the fact that the sun was gone, I could still get a perfectly clear, sharp sight picture.
It is a wonderful world we live in.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine went out West with a .338 and collected both a nice elk and a mule deer, and while the elk succumbed without a struggle, the muley made a point with his passing. The critter was shot in the shoulder, downhill, at 265 yards with a 225-grain Barnes TSX bullet at 2,750 fps. I know all this because I loaded the ammo myself.

Rather than dropping like a stone because his shoulder was smashed and his innards were pureed, as indeed they were, the mule deer did his level best to get away and required three more shots to convince him that it was time to call it quits.

None of this is detracts from the .338, or the Barnes TSX, or the shoulder shot. Almost always, when a critter is struck there and the bullet does its job, the beast goes down right away or within a few steps. The shoulder shot is the way to go if you have a bullet that will break bone reliably and if you are shooting something big that may object to the proceedings.

The lesson you can take from this incident is that shot placement is an inexact science; it’s a matter of going with the percentages. There are no guarantees handed out. Whenever you shoot, always be ready with an immediate second shot. Or a third. Sometimes, no matter how hard you hit them, they just don’t cooperate.

Those of you who saw my half-hour on the Outdoor Channel heard me claim that I had never lost a head of game that I had shot. This is true, but what I did not have time to add was that, on at least three occasions, if I had not had expert help, I would have. What I’ve learned about tracking hit animals is: Get down on your hands and knees and crawl if you have to and don’t give up.

Very often even a fatal wound will result in very small drops of blood falling very infrequently, and unless you have extraordinary eyesight you’ll miss them unless you get down on the ground and look at every leaf, twig, and blade of grass. When you do find blood, mark it with surveyor’s tape. After a while, a trail will emerge. (And if you think that blue light will show up blood in the outdoors, you can’t prove it by me.)

Fatally-hit animals can go astonishing distances and/or get themselves into spots where it’s almost impossible to locate them. Years ago in Alabama, Wayne van Zwoll shot a nice whitetail buck that ran off. Wayne began tracking it at noon, and worked on the trail through the rest of the day and into the night, then picked it up the next morning and stayed with it until evening when he finally found the animal.

Even with that kind of effort it doesn’t always work out. About ten years ago in Africa a friend shot an eland that we followed for two and a half days, dawn to dark. Its trail showed that it was eating and drinking, and after a while there was no blood at all, so the trackers said that it would recover from whatever damage had been done to it and we gave up the search.