Imagine you've just crawled through a half mile of prime rattlesnake country in New Mexico in pursuit of a big pronghorn antelope.

There's a stiff crosswind blowing and as close as you can get is about 420 yards and that buck's starting to get nervous.

It's now or never.

You've got to set up and take that

shot and your rifle system is not ideal. What do you do? I was in this situation several years back,

and my rifle was an 18-inch barreled 308, and at 420 yards, that is getting real marginal for a shot across the prairie on a

prong horn antelope or really any other type of game animal in a crosswind. I set up, I made a

clean kill with that. Thanks in great part to the fact that it's a very accurate little rifle. Funny enough,

it was a little Mossberg patriot. I think they called it the patrol, actually, with a collapsible

stock, that 18-inch barrel. I did not have a suppressor on it. Super compact and easy to crawl

with through the brush brush one on but man

just not a lot of velocity i was shooting 150 grain barns tip triple shock bullets and uh

that little rifle shot them well under an inch consistently and regularly to the same point impact

so i had the confidence i needed to make the shot.

But if it had been even 50 yards further, I wouldn't have even tried. Whereas with the rifle

is properly set up for Western big game hunting, open country hunting around the world,

really, I would have had the confidence to do that

and make a clean kill. So today, we are going to talk about how to set up a rifle that's just right

for Western hunting, kind of with a focus on backcountry hunting because a good back country hunting

rifle is useful anywhere, right?

The opposite is not necessarily true of something like a bean field rifle, big heavy

barreled rifle designed for hunting front country areas where you don't really have to pack

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