The rear of the bolt features a full shroud and a red cocking indicator; the bolt handle is brazed on. The safety is a two-position rocker style.

Shooting the trigger just as it came from the factory (set at a sensible three pounds, two ounces on average, as measured with a Lyman digital gauge), I did occasionally notice a bit of creep when shooting off a rest, but from field positions all I felt was a nice, clean break.

Cycling is not as smooth as, say, a Remington 700, but it was certainly serviceable, and I didn’t notice any bind in either slow or rapid fire.

For my whitetail hunt, I decided to take the 150-grain Remington load since it shot well and would be suitable for the open farm country of northcentral Kansas.

Normally a whitetail hunt involves sitting on your butt all day and waiting for a decent buck to appear. It’s an effective tactic for sure, but it doesn’t give you a great feel for a rifle beyond how it performs at game time. Fortunately for me, my experience wasn’t limited to that.

Dan Pletcher of High Plains Hunting (highplainshunting.com, 785-346-6426) did put me on a stand, and a good one--a hay bale blind overlooking a green field of winter wheat. The first evening I saw several decent bucks, but Kansas is famous for giant racks, and I wasn’t about to pull the trigger on some 21⁄2-year-old eight-pointer--at least not on the first day or two.

Over the next few days I saw some more just-okay bucks from that blind, but with the clear, windy weather that had swept in, it soon became apparent that if our party of four ne’er-do-well writers and Matt was going to score, we were going to have to take the fight to the deer. And when the plan called for a few midday pushes, I volunteered to play dog.

That gave me a whole lot of walking time with the rifle, threading in and out of thick cover along a winding stream bottom. A lot of deer had taken refuge there, and most of the time the XL7 was at port arms just in case.

The rifle weighs 61⁄2 pounds--not counting the Leupold 2.5-8X VX-III, which was a perfect match for the gun--and it was a pleasure to carry and felt great in my hands. It shouldered with ease on several occasions when bucks presented opportunities I didn’t take, including one young eight-pointer that stared at me from its blowdown bed a scant 30 yards away. The crosshairs locked on his chest without thought, and had he been a good buck it would’ve been lights out.

The hunt did bring out my only two criticisms of the rifle. One, I don’t like blind magazines. When you’re unloading a lot during the day (before getting into a vehicle, for example), it’s a pain to have to cycle the action to get all the cartridges out.

I also didn’t care for the follower design. I found I had to concentrate on positioning each round before pushing it home. If I didn’t focus, the rounds didn’t seem to want to situate correctly.

My chance to take a deer came on the next-to-last evening. Dan and I had spotted a good buck that morning, and we hiked a mile or so back to the area in the afternoon in hopes of catching sight of him again. Sure enough, as the sun began to set, we saw the handsome 10-pointer follow a doe out of a tree line several hundred yards away.