I had seen plenty of elk during the first few days of a hunt in those Colorado mountains but not the one I wanted to take home. Thanks to another hunter who just happened to be on the opposite side of an extremely steep ridge I was easing along, my luck suddenly changed. The small group of elk he spooked could have run in any direction, but they made the mistake of heading downhill toward me at a fast clip.

As the herd bull raced across an opening in the thick timber about 80 yards away, I swung my rifle in .338 Winchester Magnum as I would swing a shotgun on a bobwhite quail and squeezed the trigger just as the intersection of the crosshairs in my scope caught up with the front of the animal's chest. Never have I seen an elk bite the dust more quickly. As the 250-grain bullet passed through both of its shoulders, the bull's nose hit the ground, and he did a complete tail-over-antlers somersault before coming to rest in a cloud of dust.

That hunt took place in October 1992, and my report on it appeared in the April 1993 issue of Shooting Times. Five of us were on that hunt, and we all took nice bulls at distances ranging from 45 to 410 yards with a new bullet scheduled for introduction to the market within a month or two. Three of the bulls dropped in their tracks, one ran another 10 yards before dropping, and the other gave up the ghost after about 60 yards.

Needless to say, we were impressed by the performance of the new bullet. The name of that bullet is Fail Safe. Winchester could not have come up with a more descriptive name for the bullet. As hunting seasons came and went, I took enough game with it to conclude that when used on elk, moose, Cape buffalo, nilgai, and other heavy game, it simply would not fail to perform properly.

The Fail Safe is a great bullet, but it has one flaw. It works perfectly on the larger game animals out to about any reasonable distance, and it is one of the few bullets available that will smash through both shoulders of an elk and exit the offside hide. It also works fine on smaller game at close to medium ranges.

But its performance on deer can become a bit erratic at extremely long range where impact velocity is too low to cause it to expand to a large frontal diameter. All big-game bullets share this same limitation, but most will expand at lower impact velocities than the Fail Safe. This holds especially true when the target offers light resistance to the bullet, as is the case with whitetails and pronghorn antelope.

Before going any further, I want to point out that Winchester should not be criticized for any of this. The company set out to design a bullet that could not be destroyed even when fired into heavy bone at close range, and Winchester did a better job of doing that than most bullet manufacturers.

At the same time, Winchester has offered ammunition loaded with bullets such as the Power-Point, Silvertip, and Ballistic Silvertip that are designed specifically for use on deer, and all do a wonderful job there. The problem with the Fail Safe has been with those hunters who incorrectly choose an elk bullet to shoot a 100-pound whitetail at 400 yards and then complain about poor expansion.