Back when I was first getting into a little gun writing in the mid-1980�s, Browning sent me one of the first-year A-Bolts for a magazine review. It was a .270 Winchester, and at the time was about as light a mass-manufactured centerfire bolt action as there was on the market. It shot really well, and they trigger pull was decent after I worked on it a little. My wife Eileen had been hunting a couple years, and wanted something a little bigger than the .257 Roberts we�d inherited from my grandmother for elk hunting.
So we bought the rifle, upping the number of centerfires in our �collection� to three (aside from the .257, my main rifle was a Ruger 77 .30-06). Over the next few years Eileen used the A-Bolt on rockchucks, pronghorns (including one at 430 yards), whitetails, mule deer, elk and one bull moose, and at one point had a strong of a dozen one-shot kills with it on big game. Eventually we got a NULA .270 and sold the A-Bolt, because the NULA was 1-1/2 pounds lighter and shot just as well. But it worked fine for several years or pretty hard hunting, though admittedly not in Alaska.
