My personal preference would be for the 7-08 / M70 combination.
But if a little more juice is necessary or desired, I'd step up to the .300 WM / M70.
(I prefer wing safeties and locking bolts.)
If I was unwilling or unable to buy another scope, I'd put the lighter one on the rifle of choice.
It's funny--a guy I heard about this past season went on a western muley hunt-- he spent thousands on a Gunwerks rifle and another chunk on a Nightforce, and he and the guy he went with both ended up shooting their bucks at 100 yards.
It's even more funny to those of us that live out west.
We
KNOW that the average shot is well under 200 yards, and have tried telling the rest of the country that for decades.
But, people still find it entertaining to open their wallets and throw cash into the wind...
In my previous reply, I mentioned some 'long range shots'. What I didn't bring up in that reply was that, even for Pronghorn - a species universally and incorrectly known to "require" long shots - my personal average is about 205 yards. The
majority were at closer range. But the handful of long shots stretch the average to a bit over 200.
And that is in the flats - not in hilly, rolling, or rough terrain, where it's even easier to get a close shot.
It's a Bell Curve. People fixate on the extremes and forget about all the meat in the middle.
It seems like a lot of people don't even try to get closer, if they've heard that long shots are the norm for a species or hunting area. I see it as an excuse for laziness, more than anything else.
"Whelp... I dun got in to four hundred yards with my foh-wheeler. Better take the shot, even though there's a raveeen in fron'a me that'd give cover to get ta one-fifty or better, on foot. Bob, at my work, said ya only get long shots here. I better take this shot..."
But, I am probably part of the problem with that, as much as any of the rest of us on the interwebs. I don't tell many stories about the 'meat' of my bell curve. I tell stories about the extremes.
There isn't much of interest to say about knowing an area and the animals' movement patterns, spotting a speed goat a mile out, watching it for 20-30 minutes, figuring out which water hole it is heading toward, walking out across the flats to set up an ambush, and waiting 30 minutes for it to walk in close, before a single double-lung shot fills the tag.
But people do find it interesting when the antelope is so close that you actually sling your rifle and draw a pistol (my brother's story, not mine); when a herd of elk nearly tramples you to death and the healthy 5x5 that you drop was "the little one"; or when you have witnesses to a called shot into the left eye of a pronghorn at 650 yards.
The middle of the curve is boring. The extremes make better stories...