Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Africa The SXS Double Rifle Mystique

I posted the following on the "Stopping Power" thread on Ask the Gimwriters forum... I've been thinking quite a bit about this since then, so I decided to put my keyboard where my mouth is and post this here in the Africa Forum.



Now, as I stated, I am very familiar with and very comfortable with the SXS double barrel arrangement. I've done more than 90% of my wingshooting since 1977 with one of several 12 gauge doubles. This included hard-kicking magnum loads for high-flying geese, FWIW.

I nearly took a double rifle to Africa, too. Partly because I was enamored of the double rifle mystique, but partly because I am very comfortable with the handling of a double barreled firearm, and I'm very much cognizant of the advantages of the SXS double rifle, not least of which is the fact that one can fire the second barrel in a damn good hurry if it's needed to stop a charge.

With that in mind, I was also not able/willing to spend upwards of $10,000.00 to obtain a good double rifle, and that's the kind of price range we are talking about. Until I was at DSC in January of 2015, and my PH, John Sharp, told me that I should go down to Larry Pancake's booth a couple rows over from John's, and look at the very nice 9.3x74R Sabatti double rifles he had for sale. I asked John specifically if he would recommend that caliber for buffalo, and he said he had no doubt of it, provided I could load it with 300 gr Swift A-frames. So I went down the line, handled one of Larry's BEAUTIFUL rifles, and as Jorge1 will attest (he was there, the enabling sonofabitch, goading me into buying it!) it was one helluva deal. Larry really, really wanted me to take the rifle to Africa, shoot a buff with it, and then write an article about it. He was so eager that he told me he would sell it for an obscenely low price. How could I say no?

So I drove home from DSC 2 days later with this gorgeous double rifle. Purchases were made on the innanet, and within a couple of weeks I had a Trijicon 1-4X scope mounted on it, and some Hornady 286 gr loads. Off to the range I went. Load, aim, and fire. WHAM!!! That little rifle kicked the bejabbers out of me! Huh. I thought I must me holding it wrong, so I tried it again. WHAM! It felt like I'd taken a left hook to the right cheek! Now, I'm not a snowflake when it comes to recoil... I'd been practicing quite a bit with my initial African rifle, a 375 Ruger, with full-house 300 gr loads and I was more than comfortable with the big recoil of a DG rifle.

Well, after I put a slip-on leather butt extension on the thing, I was finally able to shoot it without getting a bruise on my cheek, but the gun still didn't work for me. I loaded up some reduced-power reloads for practice purposes, using AA 5744 and some 250 gr Hornady bullets, but no dice. The bullets would shoot to within 2" at 50 yards off the bench, but when I tried to stand on my two hind legs, the bullets flew every which way. Every time I mounted the gun, I had to hunt for the sights. It just didn't "come up" to my face the way any of my double shotguns do. I talked about it with our pal Patrick at Willougby-McCabe in Dallas, and he agreed this was a classic "bad fit" problem. He suggested he could have his stock maker bend the stock to try to make it fit me, but he was quick to tell me there were no guarantees short of having an entirely new stock made to my dimensions. (Being 6'2" and 210 pounds, I'm not exactly built like your average Italian...)

I put at least 200 rounds of ammo through that rifle before I decided it wasn't going to work for me. I had to consider as well that John Sharp was starting to express doubt about the 9.3x74R for buffalo... he had been doing some reconsidering since his encouraging words in January, and he was now asking me to be sure to bring my 375 Ruger rifle along as well, just to see what's what once I arrived in camp.

I agonized for days, and finally said to hell with it. I sold the Sabatti double to an acquaintance who had been drooling all over it, and sold the Ruger 375 to boot. I bought the Kimber Caprivi in 375 H&H I mentioned in the quote above, and it was love at first shot. I could make that rifle hit, accurately and quickly, from any hunting position. I fired practice rounds and full-power rounds from offhand, standing with sticks, kneeling, and sitting positions at targets anywhere from 10 yards to 200 yards, with the Trijicon scope, with the backup Nikon scope, and with iron sights. The rifle simply came up to my face perfectly every time I mounted it... and don't ask me to explain how that could be, given the difference in height of the irons vs the scopes. It just worked for me. (My reloading and range logs show I bought 100 rounds of loaded Hornady ammo, and another 100 pieces of new Hornady brass... I reloaded each case 3 times, both reduced practice loads and full power loads in a 2:1 ratio, and shot all but 120 of those reloads before I left for Africa, which is how I came up with the "nearly 700 rounds tally, if you're interested.)

Now, back to my acquaintance and the Sabatti. This chap is taller than me, and that rifle didn't fit him worth a damn, either. Of course he didn't admit that, and despite the fact that I could see he wasn't hitting his targets any better than I was, he insisted on taking it to Africa the next year. His Facebook page was full of glory pics of him kneeling behind dead critters and holding the double rifle, but he privately told me that he shot almost all his game with his .338 because he couldn't hit [bleep] with the 9.3x74R when he got to South Africa. "The light is really different there, you know," he told me by way of excuse. Bullscheit. The rifle didn't fit him and he couldn't shoot it worth a damn. The only saving grace to that story is that he didn't hunt buffalo or other Dangerous Game with it!

Now, I'm sorry for that long story... but I believe it illustrates the problem with the African Double Rifle mystique. So many of us have been romanced by tales told by Ruark and Hemingway and Capstick and God knows everybody else about how fine it is to take one's trophies with a double rifle that we have lost sight of the first rule of being a good rifle hunter, which is to say, you can hit with it and kill your quarry cleanly every time, or near as dammit. If you read those authors a bit more closely, you'll note that Hemingway and Ruark and Capstick did a damn sight more shooting with a bolt-action rifle than with their big doubles. How the double rifle became the "classic" for African hunting is a bit of a mystery to me, when I re-read these authors who are the supposed champions of the dictum. W.M. Bell, John "Pondoro" Taylor, Craig Boddington, and many other African hunting icons have demonstrated in their own shooting and subsequent writing that a good magazine (bolt-action) rifle was the best rifle for most situations and most hunters.

Yet I see fellows like my west Texas friend and the chap in the above video who gut-shot his buffalo choosing a double rifle that they are unfamiliar with, and often so afraid of that they don't put in enough practice time with it to become proficient in its use. I've had private conversations with a dozen or more African PH's who opine that most Americans who bring doubles on their first hunt aren't very good with them, and are probably better served by a magazine rifle.

I'm interested to hear what you fellows have to say. I already know there will be a lot of chest-puffing and assertions that "I shoot my double rifle impeccably", etc. Fine, I'm sure you're right. But I'm interested in reading some substantive observations and enlightening discussion from the rest of you chaps, especially those of you who own and shoot a fine double rifle.