DISTANCE AND TRAJECTORY
Thanks to the laser rangefinder--a truly wonderful tool--near-perfect knowledge of distance is now within everyone's grasp. Used correctly, the laser rangefinder does remove one of the critical variables in long-range shooting.
Of course, this is only half the battle. Once you know the range, you must also know where your bullet will hit at that range and adjust accordingly.
Do not think that this is just a matter of getting one of today's fastest and flattest-shooting magnums. Flatness of trajectory helps but not as much as you might think. Thousand-yard competitive shooters generally sight their rifles inordinately high at short range to simplify holding on their known-distance targets. Hunters cannot do that. If you sight in more than three inches high at 100 yards, you must hold low at the midrange distances. This is very difficult to make yourself do, so misses at about 200 yards are almost a certainty. With a normal sight-in of perhaps three inches high at 100 yards, we have a lot of cartridges that will allow shooting without holdover to 400 yards and change. This is a very far poke and gives a great deal of flexibility, but push them much farther and it simply doesn't matter what you're shooting. You will have to adjust your hold, and in order to do this you must know your trajectory.
It isn't impossible, not at all. At the Battle of Adobe Walls, scout Billy Dixon is credited with knocking a Cheyenne off his horse at nearly a mile. In Cuba and the Philippines, American troops using trapdoor Springfields silenced Spanish and insurgent positions at 1,100 yards. Today most of our military sniping is done with match 7.62mm NATO ammo. Downrange ballistics aren't impressive, but these kids are deadly--and consistently deadly--at 1,000 yards and beyond.
So the issue isn't really trajectory at all but how well you know your trajectory. It can be learned, but ballistics charts won't tell you what you need to know. The only way to effectively shoot at distance is to actually shoot at distance--a lot-- with the exact rifle and load you intend to use. Few of us actually shoot at 400, 500 and 600 yards, and if you don't, you have absolutely no business shooting at game at these distances.
It takes both a steep angle and considerable distance before the uphill/downhill trajectory phenomenon becomes critical, but at long range this is a factor that is very difficult to judge and must be taken into account.
This is because ballistics charts are only a guide. Your barrel may be faster or slower because of internal dimensions. It may be longer or shorter. The height of your scope above the bore may be different from the standard used on the charts, and this throws off everything. At medium ranges these differences may not be enough to matter, but at long range everything matters. These things can be learned, but it takes hundreds of hours and thousands of rounds at genuine distances.
Another supposed shortcut is the scopes that allow you to dial-in the range. Some are useless and some work very well, but none is so good that it provides a textbook solution without actually shooting at real ranges to verify each increment of adjustment. Personally, I have found very few "dial-in your range" scopes to have adjustments consistent and accurate enough to make this possible. Because of this, I much prefer to leave the adjustments alone and use reticles with additional stadia lines or aiming points such as mil-dot reticles. These work, but again, you must shoot them at actual ranges under ideal conditions because the textbook solution is very unlikely to be a perfect match to your rifle and load.
WIND
Once you get past knowledge of distance and trajectory--and with practice you can get past them--you must deal with wind. There is nothing simple about this. Even on a formal rifle range with range flags blowing, it's hard to figure. In the field it is almost impossible. There are great little wind gauges that will give you the wind speed and direction, but this only applies at the rifle. You also must judge the wind at the target and along the way between you and the target.
It's a simple thing to learn that a 10-mph crosswind will blow a .30 caliber 180-grain spitzer bullet with a muzzle velocity of 3,200 fps somewhere between 14 and 20 inches (depending on the exact bullet) off course at 500 yards. But what does a 10-mph wind feel like? And how do you tell if the wind is the same at the animal?
This excellent Yukon Dall ram was taken with one of my longer shots. The wind was dead calm, I knew the distance and the trajectory, I had a good rest, and there was absolutely no way to get closer. Sometimes it's appropriate to take a long poke.
There are clues as to what the wind is doing downrange, like waving leaves and moving grass. With experience, a few really great riflemen--like Carlos Hathcock--develop an innate feel for it that is almost like a sixth sense. But there's no way to be sure. In sniping, given the vertical presentation of a human and the relatively narrow target, misreading the wind probably means a miss--or a perfectly acceptable wounding shot. In hunting, with the horizontal presentation of four-footed animals, misreading the wind is much more likely to mean a wounding shot. Sometimes, of course, it's calm. Sometimes there's a very mild breeze that seems consistent. If everything else is accounted for, then you can take the shot. But if there's much more than a puff of breeze, you probably need to get closer. And guess what?
The hunting country where long shooting is most likely--plains, mountains, tundra--is usually windy country.
ACCURACY AND STABILITY
For serious long-range shooting there is no such thing as too much accuracy. The kind of group that we think of as perfectly adequate for hunting accuracy--say, 11?4 inches at 100 yards--is nowhere near good enough. With normal spread, that's more than six inches at 500 yards, which is still well within a deer's vital zone. Except very few rifles and riflemen can hold a group to that normal spread at extreme range.
Again, the only way to know how well you and your rifle can shoot at 500 yards is to actually shoot at 500 yards. Once in a great while you run into a rifle that groups better farther out than up close, but don't count on it. I figure the standards for a serious long-range rifle are about the same as for a serious varmint rifle. I want consistent groups of 1/2 inch or less at 100 yards, and I feel a whole lot better if I can break the quarter-inch barrier.
