oldelkhunter -- email me and I' ll follow up!
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Big Bore Rifles don' t have a real large following, so finding much literature on it or finding people who can REALLY talk knowledgably about them AND the kind of hunting they are intended for is quite limited.

Reading:
Craig Boddington' s " Safari Rifles" is a technical piece and gets into the history including present day AND gets into a survey of what Professional Hunters recommend for their clients: 1 gun, 2 gun, 3 gun batteries (not AA Batteries, BJ) and WHY. I spent a lot of time here before I opted for my 416 Rigby -- weighed it against the 416RemMag for a LONG time (really close in overall trade-offs).

Ruark' s " Use Enough Gun" gets into his experiences in Africa using 4 rifles: a 220 Swift, a 30-06, a 375HH, and a 470 Nitro Express double. Fun reading there.

Barnes Reloading Manual #3 -- Barnes gets into cartridges/calibers and aggressive loads that the other manuals don' t even touch!

Websites:
(A) www.accuratereloading.com -- forums -- (1) Big Bores, (2) African Hunting, (3) Big Game Hunting.
(B) www.sci.com -- community -- local chapters

Training:
Hands on instruction, is the most interesting (and possibly the most diverse and possibly most unavailable) part -- we were lucky enough to " fall into" a shooting center owned by an African hunting PH who had also taught at the PH school in South Africa. There has to be more of them around cut from a similar " bolt of cloth" . Shooting centers in affluent sectors of metro areas (source of safari clients) would be a possible contact point -- safari club international events would be another.

Example:
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Geometrically a straight line can be identified by its two end points. In our case one end point is your eye and the other is the game animal. Do not let anything interrupt this line! Your rifle should come up from below, parallel to this line keep allowing you to keep both eyes on the animal until the rifle sights (iron or scope) come up into view. Don' t give up the animal with (both) your eyes until you see it in your sights!

Reprimand:
On the dry fire simulation which involved several steps (the one above just being one of them) I violated this rule, hoisted the rifle up at a 20 degree angle thru the sacred " sight line" with the intent of " zeroing in" upon the target by " snapping to it" or " settling in" from just above (Just like I been doing for 30 years, by Gawd). " FREEZE! That lion at 50 yards charged just as you covered him up with your rifle and your forearm, you lost him in your scope and since you were blocking me as PH I couldn' t shoot him off of you before he roughed you up a bit -- you were lucky, but you are going to spend the next six weeks in a Niorobi hospital with the nastiest infection you' ve ever seen! DON' T DO THAT!"

" Okay, Yank -- even if you are just hunting elk don' t violate the sight line -- keep your eyes on the game. A hunter that knows this will have his elk shot while another that blocks the target, points the rifle in the general direction, peers through the scope, tries to find the elk, and then peeks over the scope, and then ducks back down to the scope -- all he can find is trees, and meanwhile the elk are gone -- and he loses the target altogether" NOW START OVER!"

[I' ve been working on this one with a scoped air rifle in the back yard and three different targets over a 150 degree arc from left to right. You can do it --- your mind will " magically transition" over from two eyes at 1x in plain view to one eye at 4x through the scope without ever giving up sight/location of the target -- it' s bizzare but it works (but ONLY if the rifle comes up level from underneath AND DOESN' T BLOCK your " line of sight" !]

It is amazing how quickly you can identify, acquire, and fire offhand (accurately) using this method combined with the other methods taught.

Never Go Undergunned,

EKM