Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Your Perfect Mule Deer Rifle

Sam;
Happy Thanksgiving to you sir, I trust that this has been a good one for you and yours.

Thanks for the interesting reading and viewing that your question/thread has provided. It's interesting how many different roads there are that lead to the same eventual outcome, isn't it?

Anyway, there was a time a couple decades back when we (my hunting partner, my good wife or I) would end up dragging at least one and most years two mulies off the local hills on our backs.

I built a .308 Norma on a wartime 98 action for my wife to give us a bit more reach across the feeder creeks and such. It looks like this.


I liked the cartridge so much that I cobbled together a Norma for myself on a 77 action and between the two rifles accounted for a fair few mulie bucks - along with the odd whitetail - over the years.

Sometime a bit later I started hunting this way.


For that style of hunting I modified a No. 1 which happened to be in .300 Win Mag - and the combination of the No. 1 and Carly the Appy proved to be a workable solution too.

This wasn't a horse hunting day exactly - it was a day off school for the girls so naturally we went hunting.

The No. 1 still worked there too, as long as I didn't have to carry it too far, as like another hat wearer here, I'll admit to being not that rugged a fellow.


That time frame in my life accounted for the most mature mulies, so a 165gr or 180gr bullet heading out at 3100fps was the recipe.

Somewhere along the way I began to care less and less about mulie racks though Sam. Who knows, I might take up the chase again some year again - or not. This guy for instance is laying almost exactly where our eldest shot her mulie from this fall -on the mountain just behind our place.



These days I just use a plain vanilla .270 money pit 98 parts gun to fill the freezer most falls if I can. It weighs 7lbs holding 5 rounds of 130gr bullets that exit going 3050fps.

So that's my current mulie rifle and the path I've taken to get there.

Thanks again for the thread Sam and again all the best to you and yours this Thanksgiving.

Dwayne