I'll let you in on a little secret: For the most part, the writers who accepted this assignment did so with some reluctance. The ground rules? They had to pick a single favorite deer rifle--no equivocating and no writing about how hard it is to choose just one. It was a tough job, one writer likening it to picking just one supermodel to go out with. We're obviously paying that guy too much.

Still, I'm sure most of you would find it a difficult assignment as well (picking a favorite rifle, I mean). For others, the point is moot: You own and hunt with a single deer gun. But even if you own only one, chances are that over the years you've bought and sold guns until you found the one that was just right.

The cliché of a hunter carrying his "trusty rifle" is rooted in the reality that a rifle is in fact a trusted piece of equipment, endowed with characteristics real (it shoots well) and imagined (it's lucky). In time these rifles become more than the sum of their parts, more than the wood, plastic and metal from which they're built. We clutch them in anticipation on countless opening mornings, get dinged and scratched right along with them as we hike mountains and cross creeks, and unload them slowly and thoughtfully as we stand over a fallen buck.

As the following stories illustrate, deer guns become storehouses of memories, and every time we pull them out of the cabinet, they give us an instant connection to years of hunting, to a single, incredibly memorable experience or perhaps to something else altogether. --J. Scott Rupp

Craig Boddington

CRAIG BODDINGTON
Dakota Model 76
.270 Win.
My favorite deer rifle is my Dakota M76 in .270 Win. It's light and trim, with a classic-styled stock of decent walnut, definitely my preference. It's chambered to .270 Win., a cartridge just right for deer hunting. It's plenty powerful enough for the largest-bodied deer, flat-shooting enough for long shots if necessary, and it's easy to shoot.

My Dakota .270 has been to Africa several times and all over Europe. It's been sheep hunting and elk hunting, and although I haven't taken a great many deer with this particular rifle, it has accounted for several memorable bucks.

Near the top of that list is a great mule deer I dropped on a windy afternoon among sand ridges on the central coast of California. I was hunting alone and the deer simply vanished after the shot. I rethought the hold several dozen times while I looked for him, only to find him piled up in the bottom of a little ravine hardly 30 yards away.

Then there was a nice blacktail buck far across a canyon in Oregon, an awfully long shot but doable. The rifle did it.

Most recently, when I was home on leave from Southwest Asia in 2002, I had time for just one quick deer hunt, which would be my entire hunting season. Without hesitation I reached for my now-battered Dakota. Casey Tillard and I caught a huge-bodied, well-antlered old buck in a little sagebrush draw. I shot the deer quartering away at about 200 yards. And, of course, the mulie buck took two steps and piled up. That was an important hunt for me, a nice break in a tough year.

Even though I've mostly used the Dakota .270 for game other than deer, it's still my favorite deer rifle.

LEGENDS: Winchester Model 94
1884-present. The lever-action gun that won the West has also accounted for more deer than perhaps any other, primarily in the .30-30 Win. chambering.

LEGENDS: Remington Model 760
1952-82. Lives on as the 7600. Walk into any hunting camp in Pennsylvania the night before buck season, and you'll find gun racks full of these pump-action rifles.