The .300
Posted on November 2, 2013 by bob in OffTheBeatenPath
No doubt the old man was a romantic, but not the kind found in paperback romance novels. He was a dreamer and a hunter, and when he dreamed he saw Alaska, Africa, India; brown bear, elk, lion, buffalo and tiger, his thoughts moving about like the vast northern caribou herds of his imagination.
He saw himself stalking the mountains and savannas of the world after the hoofed and pawed creatures of those wild places. It wasn’t just the vision of those remote lands and dangerous game that led him to the .300 Weatherby, but the romance of the hunt, the allure of the exotic.
Stocked in Claro walnut, accented with a rosewood fore tip, the Mark V Deluxe was the crown jewel of Roy Weatherby’s line of rifles. It could kill on looks alone, and the rifle’s powerful .300 magnum chambering – one of Weatherby’s most popular – was capable of taking any North American game. For hunting in Alabama, the rifle was like a cigarette boat in a swimming pool, designed not for the pine goats of the southern woods but for the hardy kudu and gemsbok of the African plains. The fact the rifle could take down just about any animal on the planet was its greatest appeal.
My grandfather and I would sit in his den, the rifle locked in a glass-doored cabinet, with him recounting the latest safari tales he’d read in the sporting magazines while my eyes never left the rifle. When it became my own I discovered a handful of finger-long cartridge in the original box. They were the biggest I’d ever seen. For a budding deer hunter, the rifle, while of the utmost quality, was a man’s gun.
My grandfather had warned me I’d need ear plugs, the rifle’s report being more a bear-like growl than a boom. He’d volunteered use of the rifle to me while I got my feet wet deer hunting, and I remembered his cautionary words as I leveled the Leupold’s crosshairs on the target downrange and touched the hair trigger.
All at once, it seemed the bear that had been loosed from within as that .300 cartridge not only roared but took a swipe at me, landing at least two blows.
Ears ringing, dizzy, with an aching shoulder, I reached for my stinging eyebrow, wiping away a drop of blood where the scope had caught me. Whether it was a poor rest, a sloppy grip on the stock, or my lack of the mass necessary to stop a recoil of that magnitude, I am still uncertain. Regardless, I cleared the rifle’s action and we walked to the target. The first shot was dead-on but my grandfather insisted two more would make it sure.
With that rifle I took my first deer and many thereafter over the years, my grandfather happy to see the Weatherby in use and even more pleased to hear, over and over again, every detail of my successful safaris. In time I would learn he had long ago abandoned the dreams that drove him to the .300 years before. He never hiked the tundra chasing caribou and grizzly, or rode elephant-back through the jungle after tiger. Television was the closest he would come to seeing them and the Dark Continent with its countless herds of princely game. His dreams, however, and his rifle, became my own.
One fall evening not long before his death, as I prepared for a hunt, I phoned to check up, certain he’d like to know I’d be hunting a friend’s place covered with big deer.
“Are you taking the three-hundred?” he asked excitedly, already knowing the answer.
“You know I am,” I said. “Say, I was wondering the other day how many deer you had killed with that rifle before giving it to me?”
A hearty laugh answered my question.
“Me? That thing kicks like a mule! I don’t know how you shoot it!”
Niko Corley spends his free time hunting, fishing, boating and enjoying the outdoors. He can be contacted at cootfootoutfitters@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter@cootfootoutfitters.
