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| This pig met a Berger 150 grain bullet at 275m from a Mauser M03 in 270 Win. |
Hello Mauser M03 fans. Long time, no see. :-)
I'm back in the hunt after a couple of years of a post-retirement sailing adventure with my wife. Quite a change of scene and one hell of a roller coaster ride, let me tell you.
My Mauser rifles are being brought back to life and have welcomed a new companion - a Model M98 Magnum in 375 Holland & Holland. What fun!
A few days ago a farmer told me about the clear signs that a large mob of pigs was moving around his property. I arranged an early morning visit. Sometimes he has a solid clue as to where they'll be, but not this time. 'Everywhere!' was the answer, so it was a cold start to the hunt. I was tying up my bootlaces as the dawn light slowly grew to the point where lumps of grass in the distance stopped looking like they needed a bullet. I kept reminding myself that pigs don't stand still like that. I was rusty.
My binoculars helped but I knew that covering ground would be better. I drove my Landcruiser sneakily down the paddocks along a creek line, past a few historical pig-rooting hot-spots. They were doing their usual slow walk back towards heavy cover when I spotted them at 200 metres distance; the exact zero for my 270 Winchester. Handy.
The mob was 12 or 15 strong but still managed to vanish from sight amongst the scattered trees and bracken. In the 30 seconds it took to lift my M03 and a leather sandbag onto the pleasantly warm engine hood they covered a surprising amount of ground, out of sight. I didn't get to see them bunching up at the hole in the fence they got through. That would have made a target impossible to miss.
My eyes picked them up strolling to the left through gaps in the trees, 50m past the fence. 'How did they get there so quickly?' I had to make a big adjustment of my aiming angle to port. The Zeiss crosshair found a gap in the trees which half a dozen pigs were about to walk into. Range ~250m - Bang! But no bang. These M03s don't go bang if you don't cock them. I was rusty.
A sweep of my thumb moved the cocking lever to starboard. 'Shit! They're all gone.' Nope - there's a straggler coming. I put the crosshair in the middle of the gap that had been full of pigs ten seconds earlier and fired as tail-end-Charlie's nose broke the vertical line. The first shot from a cold barrel, left dry and dirty after a test shot a couple of months back, flew perfectly. Charlie ran a few metres, then made a snow-angel in the leaf-litter.
These Mauser M03s are such good rifles. I wonder if Sako's offering of a take-down system will prompt Mauser to make the M03s again?
Regards, Rick.
