A wide array of hunting bullets, from left: muzzleloader round ball, cast lead bullet, jacketed pistol bullet in sabot for muzzleloading rifle, jacketed rifle bullet, Brenneke shotgun slug. By far the most efficient of these in flight is the jacketed rifle bullet. Much of a hunting bullet's energy is used to battle air resistance.

Recently, while talking with Hornady ballistician Dave Emary, I offered an idea that lead to an eye-opening conversation. "When a bullet's center of gravity is toward the front, it's easily overstabilized. Move the center of gravity to the rear, and you reduce stability." Dave looked at me.

"That's good," he said. "At least, it's good if you want the best accuracy. A bullet that's too stable keeps its yaw longer--doesn't go to sleep as fast. That's not very important in hunting bullets, because the level of accuracy most hunters expect or can deliver isn't very high. Long, hollow noses are popular in match bullets partly because target shooters need more precision and less precession--the off-axis rotation of a bullet's nose in flight."

So how accurate should a big-game bullet be?

"As a ballistician," he continued, "I spend a lot of time figuring out what will make bullets more accurate. In most cases, that's easy. What isn't so easy is making bullets accurate without violating certain rules imposed by hunters."

"Rules?" I asked.

"Like, this .308 bullet can't be longer than 1.213 inches. Or this bullet needs a flat nose and thick jacket. Or this bullet must be a boat-tail with a cannelure, a steep ogive and a box price as close as possible to that of a McDonald's Happy Meal."

"Oh."

"And then there's weight retention. You've heard the rumor that spent bullets should weigh very nearly the same as new bullets. We can make bullets like that. They're called solids. Expanding bullets get rearranged. When you rearrange things, you lose a little. Roll a pie crust sometime."

I allowed that sometime I might.

"Actually, bullets that open reliably in deer can be made to shoot very accurately. Softpoint and hollowpoint bullets, with and without caps and pegs on their noses, can be built compactly because they do not need thick jackets.

"Thin gilding metal jackets and a lead core enable ballisticians like me a lot more freedom in nose design. We can experiment with tapered heels because we're not so constrained by length limits as we would be with thick jackets or solid-copper bullets.

"The more lightweight material you have in a bullet, the longer it will be for its weight. At some point you have to reduce bullet weight to get the design you want--or put up with a bullet that's too long to stabilize in the rifling or must be seated so deep to clear the magazine that you have to reduce your powder charge."

"Then, are lightweight hunting bullets apt to be more accurate?" I asked.

"Heavy bullets can be very accurate. But the heaviest bullets have rounded noses or steep ogives. That makes them less efficient at long range and puts the center of gravity well forward. Remember that a rear-weighted bullet goes to sleep faster. We like that." "Does a boat-tail bullet shoot tighter groups than a flat-base bullet?" was my next question.

"To tell the truth, boat-tails are oversold. They fly flatter because they set up less drag than flat-base bullets, but you won't see much if any difference in trajectory for the first 300 yards.

"As for accuracy, my tests show that flat-base bullets, on average, turn in tighter groups. Making a tapered heel is tricky; you have two angles instead of one, and both must be perfect. Unlike the bullet's nose, which can take a lot of abuse without affecting accuracy, the heel must be cleanly shaped and any taper concentric. Irregularities result in tipping when the bullet leaves the muzzle. Then you kiss accuracy good-bye. On the other hand, match bullets are mostly boat-tails, and some of them print one-hole groups. It's dangerous to generalize," he said.

Though elk are tough and often warrant the use of controlled-expansion bullet types, they can be taken cleanly with more conventional bullet designs if you place your shots accordingly.

So I asked, "What's good accuracy in a hunting bullet?"

Dave thought a minute. "I can't say."

Neither can I. At the range the other day a friend fired my Model Seven Remington chambered for the new .300 Remington Short Ultra Mag. A nickel covered all three holes. That's good accuracy. But the .303 British I used for whitetails decades ago never missed a deer that I didn't miss first, and on a good day it managed only two-inch groups. Bullet choice didn't matter. It was at best a two-minute rifle.

It seems to me that accuracy standards are mostly arbitrary. We used to think a rifle that shot into a minute of angle was accurate indeed--until better rifles came along. Now we expect tighter groups. The deer aren't any smaller these days, though, and verily a two-minute rifle will keep all its bullets inside a deer's chest out to 400 yards.

Then too, there's the weak link: Us. We shooters can get half-minute groups from half-minute rifles only under ideal conditions. On the hunt, our wobbling hands scribe such great arcs as we pull the trigger that if we shot laser beams we'd still have groups as big as roasting pans at 100 yards. So accurate bullets don't help us much with big game at ordinary ranges.

Accuracy is one measure of a bullet. Another is ballistic efficiency. An efficient bullet is useful because it delivers a higher percentage of its speed and energy downrange. Put another way, it loses less speed and energy in transit than does an inefficient bullet. Speed retention is the key. A bullet that sheds its velocity slowly flies flatter (because gravity has less time to work on it over any given increment of yardage) and hits harder (because a main component of the energy equation is impact velocity). Bullets with high sectional density (the ratio of a bullet's weight to its diameter squared) and sleek form are said to have a high ballistic coefficient. These long, smoothly-tapered boat-tail bullets are "slippery" in flight, parting the air easily. Drag on the nose, sides and base battles the bullet's forward momentum, but less successfully than if the bullet were short with a flat nose.

Ballistic efficiency puts the bullet closer to your line of sight at all ranges, and not only delivers a big bundle of energy but helps open the bullet at extreme range. The upshot is that you can use a rifle of modest recoil--and thus shoot more comfortably and accurately--than if you were depending on a less efficient bullet to give you the same results.

The third measure of a bullet is its terminal performance. A big-game bullet must open to carve a big wound channel. It must also hang together to penetrate. The jacket and core must be so designed that you'll get a clean kill whether you're shooting a deer at 350 yards or an elk at 26--a tall order! Bullets that open quickly are perfect for the long shot at the deer but may blow apart at high impact speeds on elk. The deep-driving elk bullet may hardly open at all when it strikes a distant deer at low speed. So you pick your bullet for the kind of hunting you do.

In general, it seems to me that hunters diversify too much when it comes to bullet selection. Some have several loads for one rifle, ostensibly to match the game and field conditions. If you're constrained to hunt only with one rifle, say, a .30-06, three loads might not be too many. Still, you'd get along nicely on any game trail with a 165-grain quick-opening softpoint and a 180-grain bullet designed to penetrate.

Use too many bullets, and you may start to doubt your rifle, perhaps changing scope adjustments or using Kentucky windage to compensate for a change in load. It's better to sift out several bullets built for the kind of terminal performance you need most of the time, then test them for accuracy and velocity in various loads. Choose one load, zero your rifle for it and use it for all your hunting. Unless the cartridge is of marginal power (the .257 Roberts for elk, for example), bullet choice won't matter as much as your confidence that the bullet will hit where you aim. Ordinary softpoints kill elk easily from the side; stout bullets that zip through little deer also kill those deer. Recover bullets from game but don't pay too much attention to retained weight. Shrapnel lost in the vitals behaves like grenade fragments, often killing the animal quicker than a bullet that finishes like a catalog specimen.

On the next page are some of the most popular American hunting bullets. When experimenting, split the box with friends so you each have 25 bullets for preliminary load development. You can test more kinds of bullets if you cut costs.