REVIEWS
Expressly For Dangerous Game
Ed Brown's got a serious stopping rifle.
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We had been tracking the small herd of Cape buffalo for almost three hours, and now we had finally closed the distance to 40 yards. It was now or never. The bull turned to the left just as I shot, but I felt pretty good about the bullet placement and gave him a follow-up as he ran off, surrounded by other buffalo. We quickly followed, finding the bull standing 100 yards away, head down. I got on the shooting sticks, switched out the solid round in the chamber for another softpoint at the urging of my professional hunter and fired again. The bull went down, and we moved in, guns at port arms.
The bull was stretched out in the yellow grass when we reached him. Professional hunter Peter Barnard and I were in the lead of our party of six, and just as we got within poking distance the bull started to lurch to his feet. As my wife, Diana, told me later, an excited chatter went up as the rest of the party backed quickly away. I didn't notice. The Ed Brown Express was moving to my shoulder as if I had all the time in the world, the trigger breaking the instant the crosshairs found the bull's spine. The Hornady solid put the bull back down, this time for good. It seemed unhurried to me, but Diana said it all happened within a second or two.
I had a tag for a second buffalo, and on the last day of the hunt, an old "dagga boy" bull bedded down just 25 yards from us before I could get a shot. But we could still see him quite well and since we were so close, shooting was still an option. "Just put one right in his shoulder," Peter said in a whisper. I put the crosshairs at a point where I figured I could drive one through the near shoulder and into the vitals, then fired. The bull rolled over, and before Peter could even finish the sentence "Give him another," I'd cycled the bolt and fired again.
"Boy, you were really on top of that second shot," Peter said as we stood over the bull, which he estimated at 13 to 15 years of age.
I'd promised myself before I went to Tanzania that I'd follow Craig Boddington's advice about dangerous-game hunting: don't stand around and admire your first shot; keep shooting until the animal's down, dead or gone, and be quick about it. Thanks to the new Ed Brown Express, following that advice wasn't a problem.
The rifle is the result of two years of development, including extensive testing on dangerous game. The man behind the gun, Ed Brown himself, is serious about his hunting, and he decided to build a rifle that would meet his own high standards. He built a prototype in 2002, messed around with it for a year, then in 2003 built two rifles--one in .458 Lott, the other in .375 H&H--and headed for Zimbabwe, where he shot lions, leopards and elephants.
"I'm alive, so they worked well," Ed says with a laugh. "We didn't make too many changes based on that trip, mostly just tweaking dimensions."
The resulting new Model 704 action, on which the Express rifle is built, has a lot of things going for it, and the biggest is the controlled-round-feed bolt.
Gone is the long claw extractor that has long characterized the controlled-round feed, developed with the Mauser 1898, and in its place is a system that Ed calls the first real advance in controlled-round feed in 100 years.
"The problem we saw is that the bolt lugs aren't guided, at least on any Mauser 98 and Winchester Model 70 variants we've seen, and that can lead to binding," Ed says. "Ours has a groove in the right lug to prevent that possibility.
