Knowing the gun is important. Not knowing the range sometimes makes a MOA rifle look bad. It is always the rifle's fault! OH yeah, and checking the sight in before each hunting season might be advisable (which I almost always do - ran out of time this year).
My 725 in .260 is an honest MOA rifle on paper, at ranged distances. Get it out in the field, tho, it's accuracy goes all to hell. Once it pecker-shot a caribou. (Distance and wind). Just a couple weeks ago, it skinned a nice bull caribou's leg about 6 inches over the hoof pretty good. Dumped him on the ground with what I thought was an impressive shot, but he got up again. Missed next two shots totally, even holding high. He was moving right along, too, getting farther away all the time. Made him limp for a time. Last I saw of him at the time he was using all four legs, just limping some on the one, as he disappeared into the valley brush about a mile away. "Flesh wound", I told my wife. Only animal I have never attempted to follow up. Still a bad feeling!
I know,"for a time", cuz he wasn't limping the next day when my wife shot him. Noticed the split skin when I went to drag him down to a flatter spot for dressing. Took a better look at his antlers, and yep - same bull. He had a couple bad days, but suddenly I was having a very good one.
A bit later, that first day, on my way back to sight in a rifle that I had lost all confidence in, it did just fine on a 100 yard bull. I mean, how far off could it be, at that range? Bullet went right to POA. Down at the truck that night, it put two bullets two inches high into a piece of mining refuse at 106 paces, with a center to center distance of 1/4 inch.
See what I mean about it behaving itself on paper? Or in this case, a 2' X 3' piece of 3 inches of styrofoam bonded to a half inch of concrete, with an inch-diameter permanent marker dot drawn on it.
Now, Ironbender told me not to tell you guys this, but we are all friends here, right? And discrete?. Kindly even!
The extractor on the .,260 broke at the Cody WY gun range last year and I never got around to getting the replacement fitted. Only two of my other rifles were ready to go - a .338WM sighted in with 250 grain Hornady RN (some 10 years ago), and a heavy barreled Mauser 98 (10.5 lbs) that gets one inch groups at 300 yards. The '98 went as did the .260 as a single shot, with spare rounds in the magazine. All told, the .260 weighs right around 7 to 7.5 lbs, sling, scope, and 10 rounds. More better than either oif the other two for packing around a mountain- and I really wasn't expecting that much of the hunt anyway that first day (see 40 mile caribou on Alaska thread)
Just wait 8-10 seconds for the brass to cool and shrink, tip the muzzle up, open the bolt, and the empty brass slides right out. Maybe a bit of a stock bump sometimes... the next one chambers just fine, and it's faster than a ML!
Tho not as fast as a real single-shot. And unfired chambered rounds are a bit stickier to unload.
It took two pretty good bulls on two successive days, so, hey! My wife's was at about 137 yards on the rangefinder, which had refused to work for me on that first bull the day before. He was well within the range of the Leupold 800i - just would not pick it up. Bull was probably 400-450, instead of my eyeballed "250-300".
Stupid gun!
I also check-sighted the '98 that first night, and packed it up the mountain the second day (did not the first). It has never been off in the several years I used it off the ATV or snow machine up in the Arctic, bringing it home with me a year ago last May. Not fired since, until the check-sight. 3 inches high at 106 - two rounds touching, but 5 inches to the right. Must have been that last trip coming home on the snow machine after killing a caribou, or the airline. 15 clicks left put the next round 3 inches high above the dot, dead in line horizontally with the first two. The advertised "1 click = 1/4 inch is slightly off, but I knew that, and by roughly how much.
That's a valuable piece of information.....
