The Outside Connection Buffalo Hunting Time Machine

Buffalo Hunting Time Machine - Modern Hunt
By: Bryce M. Towsley

It’s funny how fate works. I dreamed for years about hunting buffalo before it finally became a reality. After that first experience I knew I would do it again, I just never thought it would be so soon. Three months later, I was near Casper, Wyoming hunting buffalo once again.

This time I took a slightly different, more modern, approach. Hornady had just introduced their LEVERevolution ammunition for lever action rifles and we were planning to test the .45-70 Government load on a big bison bull. The LE ammo uses a unique soft polymer tip that is safe for use in any tube style lever action rifle’s magazine. This bullet is pointed and has a much higher ballistic coefficient than any traditional lever action appropriate bullet, which means flatter trajectories and more down range energy. Hornady also incorporated new propellant technology to boost the initial velocity.

My rifle would be the new Marlin 1895 XLR rifle that was designed to work in conjunction with the new Hornady ammo. This stainless steel, laminated stock, lever action features a 24-inch barrel designed to optimize the ballistics of the LEVERevolution ammo. Combined, the ammo and rifle represent the next step in the evolution that brings the “antiquated” lever action hunting rifle into the third millennium. While the cartridge might be a left over from the buffalo hunting era, the ammo and rifle were cutting edge modern. This made for an interesting contrast from the equipment of my first buffalo hunt.

We were hunting with Kelly, Glause an outfitter who offers hunting for a wide variety of species. But he was taking buffalo off that list because buffalo don’t like to follow the rules. It seems that fences mean nothing to a bison and Kelly was tired of the buffalo ripping up his cattle fences and wandering for miles, annoying the neighbors and leaving a path of destruction behind them. We were hunting one specific bull, the last bison on this huge ranch. He was old, big and smart. He had watched all his buddies get shot and he knew what mischief we puny bipeds brought with us and wanted no part of what we had planned.

When we located him he was far out in the snow covered badlands of Wyoming. I had ten-power Swarovski binoculars, the best optics money can buy, but it seemed like that bull could see us before we could see him. He knew that his safety was insured by distance and he did his best to make that insurance plan wide and long.

Slogging uphill through knee-deep drifts of wet, soft snow made climbing tough on a flatlander like me. But, once we reached a high point we could again glass the bull off in the distance. We planned a brilliant stalk with no possibility of failure. We walked a lot, ran a little and finally hit our bellies to ease over the last ridge. Instead of a big buffalo standing broadside waiting to be shot, we saw his narrow butt hustling over the horizon two hundred yards off.

This repeated until I was starting to think that maybe I wasn’t smart enough or tough enough to be a buffalo hunter. Finally, Kelly put together a strategy that looked like it might work. Or at least my legs and lungs, which were getting bitchy, ruled that it “better” work or they were calling for a general strike.

I was starting to agree with them as ten minutes into the climb my sea level conditioned lungs were sucking air like a Hoover with a leak. I stuck to the thought that has gotten me through so many climbs, “one foot in front of the other and repeat” until I could reach the top of the hill. We hit the muddy snow at the windswept ridgeline with our bellies and crawled through the slop to the top. The buffalo was below us and walking up a deep coulee on our left, hidden from anybody not above him. He was looking back over his shoulder, expecting us to follow the same line we had been on before Kelly decided that we should circle to flank him. When he stopped at 150-yards I lined the crosshairs up on his shoulder and sent 325 grains of Evolution to greet him. I remembered how tough buffalo are and I also remembered that our goal was to test this new bullet. Both problems are best solved by more shooting. I emptied the rifle’s four other shots into his shoulder as fast as this old Cowboy Action Shooting competitor could work the lever. The sound of the five shots rolled across the plains joined by the echo as one and I switched to single loading the rifle. Two fast shots later the bull turned to face away. I used the seconds to load the magazine and when he gave me the other shoulder I put another Hornady through it and he fell a couple of feet from the tracks he was occupying when the first shot disturbed the silence a short time ago.

Eight shots hit him in the shoulders or ribs. Seven of them would have killed the buffalo by themselves; I just didn’t give them time. The other one hit the edge of a massive leg bone and deflected into the chest cavity, penetrating one lung. Four bullets passed through and we recovered the other four during the butchering process. All in all, very impressive performance from this new Hornady bullet. This was my first experience with the Evolution bullet, but in the time since I have used them on several more critters, mostly deer and hogs. They have impressed me and showed that this first display of excellence was true to the bullet’s ability.

That old bull was so big that we couldn’t haul him off with a bucket loader that we retrieved from the ranch a few miles away. When we lifted the bull his weight would cause the back tires to pick off the ground. Trying to drag him resulted in those tires just spinning and digging deep into the Wyoming soil. So, like the buffalo hunters of old, we resorted to our knives to reduce the weight to manageable pieces. I was fine with that, as I believe that a critter this big and majestic should make you suffer a little to possess him.