I have a .308 Warbird with a 27-inch barrel, and I can get a 180-grain .30-caliber bullet to nearly 3,500 fps, but the recoil is ferocious and the rifle needs to be heavy to keep the kick to an acceptable level. I've carried a big Warbird up several sheep mountains and have decided that, in my mid-50s, I need to tone it down a bit.

Left to right, .308 Patriot, .300 Winchester Magnum, .300 Weatherby Magnum and .308 Warbird. The Patriot easily exceeds the .300 Winchester Magnum velocity and is similar in performance to the Weatherby. It was made by shortening the case of the much faster Warbird.

I've always been very pleased with the ballistics of the good old .300 Weatherby Magnum, and this is essentially what the little Patriot delivers but with less gun weight and a shorter barrel. So the Lazzeroni Global Hunter, topped with a Leupold 3.5-10X VX-L and weighing less than eight pounds scoped, is my concept of a pretty good sheep rifle. But I hadn't had the chance to take a sheep trip with it, and my Texas jaunt was supposed to be its debut--and then I brought the wrong rifle.

But the Patriot-chambered Savage, which unfortunately is no longer in the company's catalog, was superbly accurate, and it still had the same capability. And I was glad I had it.

It was a horribly windy evening, and we were on one of those endless senderos. Some does came out to feed a long way down, and in a little while a big-bodied buck followed them. We studied him and realized he was a forkhorn on his right side, making him a cull.

The wind was gale force, directly left to right on that sendero, and the battery on my rangefinder had packed it in. The outfitter thought the buck was pushing 300 yards; I thought a bit less. This is easily in the ballpark for a fast .30, but the wind must have been 30 mph. I figured at least a foot of wind drift, and since the rifle was sighted at 100 yards I knew I'd have six to nine inches of drop, depending on whose range estimate was right. When the buck turned broadside, head to the left, I held way out on his neck into the wind and a bit high on his swollen neck.

He took the bullet hard, then ran into the thick brush. Dark was coming fast, and I was worried. We found the deep scrapes where he'd jumped, and a few yards into the brush there was plenty of blood. A few yards farther he had bulldozed straight through a big prickly pear and was dead on the far side. The actual shot was a bit over 260 yards, and the bullet had drifted a foot and dropped maybe seven inches, entering center on the left shoulder and exiting just behind the right shoulder.

This is what a fast .30 can do if you know where to hold it, and the .308 Patriot is a very good fast .30. I'm looking forward to taking it up in the mountains where it belongs.