dead on 250-yard hold, and a high hold on hair out to 300 yards, I decided to watch a fence line area that went straight toward a stream bank and a deep ravine that headed directly into an eroded badlands area. This was a fine ambush spot, as my scoreboard had chalked up an assortment of deer, turkeys, and coyotes here on other mornings earlier in the hunting season. With my R-15 on Sniper shooting sticks, and seated on
the outstanding H.S. Hunter’s Specialties low profile hunting seat just off the ground, my morning hunt began. Deer moved through, for the most part as doe and fawn pairs. With first light, turkeys sounded off on the ridgeline from their roost in some ancient oak trees below. This was followed by coyotes several hundred yards out in a large group doing their social thing with yelps and barks. Almost an hour went by and I was feeling the cold
sinking into my boots and upper body. It was time to fire up the FoxPro caller with a soft cry of a cottontail in distress. Several runs of two minutes were sent down the valley, then all at once movement on the fence line brought me back to reality, and the cold was quickly forgotten. A lone song dog was moving toward me, head down, as it sniffed a hot trail something had left behind the previous night. A quick range check from previous ranging on this stand indicated this target was about 225 yards out and now was coming to a stop. With the Pentax Coyote center sighting ring dead on the dog, I did my best to control the creep and humps in the R-15’s trigger. When the trigger broke the 30 Rem. popped off and the dog went down hard. The 125 grains of Core-Lokt
bullet had done its job with complete efficiency. A week later the South Dakota mountain lion season
opened and now it was off across the vast Black Hills trail system with the RZR and the Remington R-15 with 30 Rem. cartridges. With the small AR-15 platform and a five-round magazine, the rifle was a delight to shoulder quickly in the event I came around a bend and ran into a big male tomcat. I know that is wishing for a great deal, but it has happened to friends of mine from time to time up here along the Wyoming state line. Now temperatures were flat out cold, and both rifle and cartridge would need to be on their best behavior or fail under deep frost conditions in the high country of the South Dakota Black Hills. One element I had no problem with at all regarding the
30 Rem. was its ability to bring down warm targets. Being a bullet very close, if not exact, to the 7.62x39 Russian, the Core-Lokt soft nose design was about perfect in a medium velocity 30 caliber rifle. While the old 30-30 Winchester is still king of the woods and is used by brush shooting deer hunters, this 125-grain bullet and its Power Soft Point design has been relied on by hunters almost forever. Deer hunters here in west river South Dakota and back on the east bank of the Missouri hunting swamp bottoms for whitetails have indicated that when loaded in the even slower 7.62x39, it is devastating on whitetail and mule deer. With that back- ground knowledge under my belt I was feeling good about my choice in terms of the 30 Rem. and possibly taking on a mountain lion, deer, or coyote. Because of weather, obligations out of town, and other
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