The .338 Marlin Express is Hornady’s newest cartridge in a dizzying flurry of new cartridges, but it is not the most powerful one ever chambered in a lever-action rifle. Browning’s long-action BLR Lightweight ’81, with its rotating, front-locking bolt head and detachable box magazine, can accommodate belted magnum rounds as long and energetic as the .300 Winchester Magnum. A dozen chamberings include the .325 WSM. That’s all the muscle your tender clavicle will want from a rifle with an alloy receiver and weighing 63/4 pounds with a 22-inch barrel.

Based loosely on the .376 Steyr cartridge, the new .338 Marlin Express hull carries a new Hornady 200-grain Flex-Tip bullet.

But the BLR, like Winchester’s Model 88 and the forgotten Sako Finnwolf, are not traditional lever actions. Their lockup is as strong as that of most bolt rifles. While they lack the primary extraction power of the 98 Mauser and its derivatives, they can bottle 60,000 psi without strain. Even the rear-locking Savage 99 has a high-pressure ceiling—as proven by its .243, .308, .358 and .284 chamberings. Only action dimensions limit the 99 to short, rimless rounds.

Hornady’s focus over the last decade has been on exposed-hammer, rear-locking lever rifles with tube magazines—the Marlins and Winchesters whose ancestors defined the saddle carbine, won the West and became archetypal woods guns for whitetail hunters. Hornady’s great contribution to that hardware has been the “flex-tip” bullet in LEVERevolution ammunition. For more than a century, bullets for straight-tube magazines were stuck with blunt, ballistically inefficient noses. Pointed bullets resting against primers posed a hazard during recoil. Hornady solved that problem with soft but resilient plastic tips that deform easily under sudden pressure and are safe in tubular magazines, yet fly like hard-tipped spitzers.