Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/528216
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 5 2 use it all and then I started reading how-to books." And that was it. Butch Searcy's decision to make double rifles was motivated partly by the challenges it offered and partly by a desire to eat. Where most craftsmen might have seen an absence of need for big-bore, dangerous-game rifles in America, Butch saw an opportunity. "No one else was building them," Butch said, "so I decided there wasn't much competition." B utch's Quonset hut is as dark and dirty and disorganized as any Victorian gunmaker's shop, especially in contrast to the brilliant California sunshine, but inside—ah, inside there is magic. When I first visited him, there were only a few completed rifles in the safe, but they included an ornately engraved .470 NE and a stalking rifle (a single-shot with a Hagn-style, falling-block action created by Searcy) in .375 H&H that made my heart skip a beat, along with several others, and various bits and pieces of other rifles in various stages of production. And there was a .700 Nitro Express double rifle. Only an estimated 15—and that's a generous estimate—.700 Nitro Express double rifles have ever been built, in the world, and Butch has built six of them. It's a little like someone hand-building a custom automobile capable of traveling at 200 miles-an-hour. Okay. Someone built it and you bought it. Now what do you do with the damn thing? Scientists claim they are using woolly mammoth DNA to try and recreate these creatures from the distant Pleistocene, but until mammoths exists in huntable numbers, there isn't really much need for a .700 Nitro Express rifle other than bragging rights. Butch himself, who is built like a walk-in safe, told me he had once brought a much lighter