A still-hunt demands your complete focus, draws on your experience and tests you physically. It also requires resolve and constant thought. You must move at the right pace—fast in “big” places to cover enough ground to put elk in your path, slow enough in thickets to ensure that you’ll see elk before they sense you. Mistakes are costly. After the snapping and popping fade and the dust settles and swaying limbs are once again still, you chide yourself for a botched approach and start over. The next elk may be in a nearby draw or two days’ hiking hence.

Still-hunting also puts a premium on accurate shooting from unsupported positions. Sure, shots often come at short yardage. But angles can be steep; commonly you see only part of the animal; and brush may squeeze your bullet   into an alley the size of a kitchen drain.

Still-hunting is my favorite way to put elk in my sights.

If the ideal hunt is a still-hunt, the ideal rifles and cartridges for still-hunting probably aren’t what most elk hunters carry. The combination I used this fall comes close.

“We can’t tell you much about the round now,” Hornady’s Dave Emary cautioned last summer. “But this is what it will look like.” He slipped a shiny cartridge into my hand. “It makes lever rifles shoot like bolt guns.”

It didn’t look all that impressive. And it was coming on the heels of already big news in saddle-gun ammo. Two years ago Dave had extended the reach of lever rifles with a remarkable polymer-tipped “Evolution” bullet. Loaded in Hornady’s LEVERevolution cartridges, it had injected rear-locking loop-belly rifles, like Marlin’s 336 and 1895 and Winchester’s Model 94, with a dose of lethality unmatched since the advent of smokeless powders and jacketed bullets. The Evolution’s resilient pointed tip cushions the jar of recoil between bullets and primers in tube magazines. When nose pressure is relaxed during chambering, the tip springs back to its original aerodynamic form. The higher ballistic coefficient flattens bullet arcs and ratchets up velocity and energy levels. Rifles in .30-30, .35 Remington, .444 Marlin and .45-70, once considered 100-yard guns, put the new ammo to use with 150-yard zeroes and 200-yard kills.Dave Emary and his colleagues from the Hornady lab soon had toppled pronghorns beyond 200 with their new bullets. Committing to a Marlin 336 in .30-30 for the 2005 season, I shot several animals, including two elk, at ranges from 19 to 160 yards. The rifle delivered 1½-minute groups, and the bullets flew as flat as 180-grain .308s. While the 160-grain Evolution bullet was not designed to drive through the shoulders of 800-pound elk, it killed every animal cleanly.     

A pronghorn collapsed  without a twitch.

“This is the same bullet you carried last fall,” Dave told me last summer, “except for a sleeker nose and thicker jacket. But the case is truly new. We’re calling it the .308 Marlin Express.”

At first glance it looked like a .307 Winchester, a muscular cartridge introduced in Winchester’s Angle-Eject 94 XTR rifles in 1980. The .307 and its companion, the .356, never caught on. “You’re right,” Dave grinned. “It’s actually a shortened .307. But you won’t believe what it’ll do.”

Three months later I bellied into a shooting bench at the NRA Whittington Center south of Raton, New Mexico. The Leupold’s crosswire quivered to a stop, and I triggered the 336 XTR. It hopped with a restrained civility. The next bullet printed above the cold-barrel shot, and two more cut a one-inch triangle there. Not bad for a lever rifle!

The ballistics charts Dave Emary showed me that day were compelling indeed. The .308 Marlin Express outperforms its .307 parent, though the case, trimmed to accept a bullet with a long ogive, has less capacity. (The .307 and .308 ME share a 20-degree shoulder and necks of essentially the same length. But the overall length of the Hornady/Marlin case is 1.920 inches, that of the .307 and .308 Winchester 2.015.) With a 160-grain bullet at 2,660 fps, the new round comes within a whisker of matching Winchester’s .308 out of the gate (165-grain factory .308 loads clock 2,685). Zeroed at 250 yards, the .308 Marlin Express lands 3 inches high at 100 and 1.7 high at 200. At 300, it strikes just 6.7 inches low. There it’s still moving at more than 2,000 fps, towing 1,450 foot-pounds of energy. The .308 Winchester boasts only 100 foot-pounds additional thump.

At a range of 200 yards, which used to be the practical maximum for lever rifles, the .308 Marlin Express out-muscles a 180-grain bullet in the .307 Winchester by 450 foot-pounds. The real achievement, from Dave’s perspective, was getting all this horsepower under a pressure ceiling of 47,000 psi.

Higher speeds and more punch with lower pressures in a smaller case? “We get it with new ball powders,” Dave explained “The rifle design may be a century old, but these propellants are cutting edge.”

“We’re very pleased with the accuracy,” he told me. “From the bench we can ring 8-inch gongs all day at 400 yards.” Dave and his cohorts had already proven the round’s effectiveness on pronghorns at distances approaching 300 yards. The .308 Marlin Express would certainly kill an elk, but it hadn’t yet.

That would be my privilege, if I could find one in the next week.

At the range, as Dave watched in dismay, I pulled the Leupold off the 336.

“I’ll try it with irons. You already know the bullets fly flat. What you don’t know is what they’ll do on big animals up close. Besides, sneaking up to elk in timber appeals to me more than sitting at meadow’s edge waiting for them to make a mistake.”

Neil Davies and Rob Reaser took the other bunks in a ranch-house two hours and a flat tire east of Raton. Eleven square miles of oak scrub cascaded from a north rim of gray palisade rock. A dark ribbon of lodgepole, aspen and Douglas-fir crowded the rock. Soccer-field meadows had wedged their way into the oak jungle, a delicatessen for elk.

I rendezvoused with Dave, Neil and Rob in the kitchen well before dawn. We split up, each in the company of young men familiar with the terrain. Rut had peaked, but as the sky slowly bled its blackness, an occasional whistle caromed from the rims. Ben and I climbed fast through the oaks, then eased into the lodgepoles. I picked apart the shadows with a new 10x42 Steiner glass. Ben piped up with his bugle.

Suddenly a bull bellowed close by. We crept forward into black conifers. A cow elk materialized at 20 steps; then her calf appeared. I bellied into the duff. Ben pressed himself against a bole. Predictably, the bull was on the far side of the herd. We both glimpsed him through tiny gaps in the cover. Then I spied an antler tip in a bigger alley. I squirmed into prone, the rifle leveled at that ivory tine. He stepped forward, showing a huge seven-point rack—and, alas, nothing else.       

As if to frustrate me further, he attacked a small lodgepole, raking the tree for several minutes. With a scope I might have shot him in the neck. With open sights, even a 70-yard poke at the spine behind the skull is risky. As the bull raked, Ben came alive with a cow call. At the same time, the calf bumped against our scent pool. Branches cracked and a tawny river of elk flowed through the alley past my sights. In its wake stood one animal. My bead quivered on the front rib of a tall, muscular elk—surely the bull. But those great creamy antlers were now hidden. What if the torrent of elk torsos had swept the bull with it? My tag allowed me to shoot a cow, but I didn’t want to. This was my chance, my last and only chance to shoot what most likely was the big seven-point. And it would soon vanish.

I held my fire.

When the bull left, it was all at once, heavy-spoked antlers turning, ribs sliding behind trees at the same time. Tines tore through the conifers. He was gone.

Such is elk hunting.

Ben graciously let me lead through the timber as the sun climbed and elk moved to bed. The forest floor was quiet, though hard wind caromed off the cliffs above. Padding along elk trails, quartering into the breeze sifting through the lodgepoles, I dangled the Marlin in my right hand. Without a scope, it carried as easily as an ax. It felt proper, this rifle, its lean and simple elegance suited perfectly to the task.

Still-hunting demands that you trim down. It is a game of essentials.

Superfluous gear and clothing only get in your way, as do extraneous thoughts.

Still-hunting, you attend what matters and nothing else. You mind the wind and tune your ear to tiny sounds. You scrutinize every line and color as each step shows you new slots in the lodgepoles. You sniff the currents, engineer each footfall, throttle your pace to match the cover. You stay out of sun-shafts and blowdowns, keeping to elk trails and stopping where you can place your feet for a shot. Still-hunting, you’re a predator. Move too fast, scuff a shoe, overlook the reflection of a wet nose or an eye, and you start over. Every step is a commitment, each moment a test, the passing hours an exercise in patience. Let your mind wander or your body relax, and the elk will win.

As morning melted into midday, they almost won again. The bull came through open forest, uphill toward the jungle to our backs. You could call me lucky, because I didn’t know this bull would be there. On the other hand, I had chosen trails threading thickets tight against the rock, where elk would bed.

The wind quartered toward me; the sun, slivered by branches, bore in from the rim behind.        

Okay. I was lucky the elk didn’t see me first. I caught a wink of antler moving between pines and held my hand palm-out behind, hoping Ben would stop. The bull may have sensed that the woods had gone still. He paused. The bead quivered against his shoulder, and the Marlin’s hammer fell.

The red-tipped softpoint shattered the elk’s clavicle just above its heavy ball joint. With another round chambered, I swung with the animal as it labored into thicker bush. A slot opened, and I fired again. The elk spun, giving me a tiny wedge of neck between trees. The bullet clipped a bole. I levered another one into the same groove. By this time I knew the elk was about to drop, but it’s good policy to shoot as long as there’s life. The last rounds were unnecessary. I knelt by the six-point and found the first two Hornadys had struck just a hand’s width apart. Either alone would have  proven fatal.

The woods relaxed as I broke out the camera, then my little muskrat knife, and finished out the morning. Dave and his companions arrived shortly. He was ecstatic. “I knew this bullet would hold up!” he beamed. “But this is a torture test we couldn’t put together in the lab.”

Elk shoulder at 60 yards mangles the most sophisticated bullets, and I didn’t expect to find much more than shards. No matter. Any bullet that reaches vitals through big bone has done its job. Boning out the elk, I cleaned what was left of the clavicle and laid it out in pieces. The .308 Marlin Express had indeed struck a mighty blow.

Dave’s turn came the following morning, after we’d spent hours chasing echoes of bulls that never bellowed twice. We climbed through a matrix of meadow and oak, toward the lip of a long, deep, brushy draw. Dave reached it first. Through the oaks we saw him snap the Marlin to his shoulder. Five fast shots later, we joined him on a rocky knob. “The first hit was good,” he grinned. “But he scrambled . . . ”

We found the bull, a six-point, dead. Dave had killed it with a .307, one of just four Marlin rifles factory-chambered for the round years ago. Of course, he used an Evolution bullet.

Neil Davies had seen no elk that morning when he heard Dave’s barrage. Then he and his guide climbed into a conifer thicket. Mike bugled. Instantly, a bull answered. In short order, Neil had a six-point in his sight. When he triggered his 336, the elk dropped. It was his first bull, and the second taken with the .308 Marlin Express.

Rob would shoot an elk with that round on the last day of his hunt—a heavy-antlered animal that took his bullet low in the chest and dashed across a meadow. Rob fired his rifle dry, and then some. But the first hit eventually brought the elk to bay, and Rob crept in for a finishing shot.

From the last three elk we recovered three bullets, all tattered but fully expanded, with the shank and a remainder of core intact. Weight retention was about half; not as much as hunters these days seem to expect. I can’t say which half of such a bullet kills an elk and which is wasted, so I’m content to find both a fragmented nose and a heel stump.

“Honestly, I don’t think you need more horsepower than this short .308 for elk,” Dave said as we parted. Self-serving? No more than if I had said you don’t need a bolt rifle or a scope. You can buy more reach, finer accuracy, more precise aim. But in the thickets where bull elk find refuge, a lean lever-gun that points easily and recoils gently makes a lot of sense. Especially if it hits as hard as the .308 Marlin Express.