The beauty of the .375 is that it’s powerful enough for the biggest game but flat-shooting enough for open country.

This is light for a .375, and when you add the extra velocity the recoil is substantial but not uncontrollable. On the other hand, it's a joy to carry. Like any .375, it would be a perfectly suitable one-rifle African battery, and since it's based around the standard action size with essentially a standard stock, it is one of the most reasonable .375s.

Last May and June I carried it in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. I carried it a great deal more than I shot it. However, I did use it for quite a variety of animals, from plains game to buffalo. After all, that's what a .375 is really all about.

My buffalo was an old Zambezi Valley dagga bull, caught napping at midday in cool shaded sand in a riverbed. A brushy island in the middle of the river gave us cover to about 100 yards, and when we took a peek the buffalo was up and staring straight at us. This is a long shot on a buffalo, but with a scoped .375 I was still in the ballgame.

The buffalo was facing me, black animal in deep shadow, but I was steady on the sticks and the bright tritium post of the Trijicon scope was clear on the chest. The first shot rocked him back, but he gathered himself and ran toward the bank. Abandoning the sticks and swinging with him, I shot him three more times while he covered 30 yards. That is another attribute of a .375: With light recoil you can recover quickly.

I also used the Hawkeye on a hunt in the Eastern Cape that included fallow deer and lechwe. On the fallow deer, the cover was such that we set up on a hillside overlooking a thick river bottom where we'd seen a herd with a good buck. When they trooped out, I flattened the one I wanted at 230 yards. Later that same day I shot a fine lechwe at similar distance, and on the last day I shot a warthog at less than 20 yards. So the .375 Ruger definitely demonstrated the versatility that is the hallmark of any .375: big game and small, close shots and far.

In June I took part in the hunting debut of Kimber's new Caprivi rifle in northern Namibia. It was a long-awaited big-bore rifle from Kimber, and appropriately its initial chambering is .375 H&H.

The Empire Legacy's options include an aperture sight that fits into the scope mount milled into the rear receiver bridge.

We did our sight-in work the moment we arrived, on a shooting bench set up right alongside the airstrip, and my borrowed Caprivi, topped with Leupold's new VX-7 1.5-6X scope, put two softpoints and one solid in one ragged hole--dead on at 50 yards.

The Caprivi is designed as a classic African "express rifle," stocked in beautiful English walnut with wraparound checkering, pancake cheekpiece and ebony fore-end tip. Metalwork is equally classic: matte blue throughout with good iron sights, barrel band front swivel, two-screw rear swivel and steel bottom metal. The action is controlled-round-feed, and in .375 H&H the magazine holds four.

Regrettably, the Caprivi is available in right-hand action only, which gave me something to complain about, although it didn't slow me down too much.