You are not getting " Hammered". Take the chip off your shoulder. Unless you use a chronograph to know what MV you are getting out of that short barrel, you can't use any of the computer tables to factor down range velocity. If you don't do comparison penetration testing, You can't know the effectiveness of a conical vs. a RB.
Generally, its much more difficult to get the velocity out of a short barrel to move a conical fast enough to upset in the thin body of a deer. If you hit the ball of the shoulder joint, it has enough mass to at least bend the nose, but causing it to expand to any extent is pure chance, as the speeds you get using BP and conicals, in short-barreled guns. If you happen to shoot an OLD buck, with matured bones, and you hit those bones, you may see the bullet expand before it leaves the body on the other side.
By comparison, the pure lead ball does not need much velocity to expand well in soft flesh, and tender bones. The lead ball is idea for killing whitetails. I am not going to claim its perfect for taking the larger mule deer, nor Elk, Caribou, or Moose. Certainly not in the .45 and .50 caliber guns used by most whitetail hunters. These small balls will take the small antelope quite efficiently, however. The larger members of the deer family need at least a .54 cal. RB, and anything larger becomes the " Magnum" of BP hunting. The larger calibers really come into their own when taking large, heavy boned members of the deer family, and justify the time taken to learn to control heavy recoil in these guns to make sure you get full penetration and expansion in these large animals.
As to tracking in still water, animals use the same crossings over and over again. If you look where a deer enters a pond, or swamp, then look across the way, you will almost always find the beginning of a trail on the other bank where it came out.
Wild animals live with the law of Conservation of energy. Wounded or injured animals are fighting the fever they get in their heads, due to all the adrenalin rushing blood to their brains quickly. They head to water, or muddy areas, to find a place where they can cool down. They use still water to escape dog packs, and then find a place to lay down. In still water tracking, you see disturbance of pond scum on the surface, disturbance of the mud in the shallow water, and when the mud settles, obvious deer tracks in the mud under water.
Again, deer have a purpose for entering water. They don't want to be cold, or stay cold longer than necessary. Neither would you if you were being chased.
When tracking deer across moving water- stream, or river-- any disturbance of the surface or the bottom mud is washed downstream almost instantly. But, the tracks disturn the mud on the bottom, and any scum growing down there. You will see discolored "spots" where the animal( or person) walked through the shallow river or stream. Those are your tracks to follow. If the water is too deep to see the bottom, you go to the opposite bank and search the shallow water there for signs of disturbance. Again, look for game trails, or obvious signs of recently broken down grasses and brush. Then check the ground for your deer's tracks. If you have taken the smart time to measure each of the 4 tracks of your deer, back at the place where he was first hit, noting both length and width of each of the 8 toes nails we call hooves, and noting any accidental cuts, injuries, chips(deformities), in each nail, it should not be difficult picking up the deer's tracks on the other side of the stream. His body will be dragging some water up the bank, and into the woods, for you to notice, as well.
I have tracked deer in a number of situations, including deer that began bleeding immediately, others that did not leave a drop of blood for the first 25 yds. and one that didn't drop any blood for more than 100 yds. I have tracked deer hunters swore they hit, only to find the twig hit that sent their well-aimed ball off somewhere else, and used the tracks to show the hunter that his "deer" shows no sign of being injured. I have shown hunters where they walked right over a half-dollar sized spot of blood, not seeing it at all, and then showed them where the deer turned to his right( dominant side) while the hunter wandered off to the left, only because it was an easy path to follow. His deer was down less than 30 feet from that blood spot. It was the only blood along the escape route, which was less than 25 yds long, but the hunter "lost" the deer.( That's how I came to be involved in tracking down the deer for him.)
Just because a deer's tracks seem to be pointing to a water way, don't ASSUME the deer actually entered the water. My friend, Don, tracked a deer for an archer, and found it lying down next to a log on the near side of the river, next to one of two deer crossings on the property. The hunter had waded across and searched for the deer on the other side for hours, the afternoon and night before. Don saw his tracks, and how he never looked to his left( upstream) from the crossing, where the deer was lying next to that log. Don was following deer tracks, and saw where the deer turned, instead of going into the water.
The hunter tried to claim this was not his deer, because he had been to this crossing several times, and did not see it. Don had to show him his several tracks, that clearly showed he never looked where the deer was lying. They then checked the location of the wounds, and it matched perfectly the angle of the shot the archer had described he took from a treestand on the adjoining property. Because the deer had been laying in mud and shallow water in the shade of the bank of the river, the meat was not spoiled, even tho it was early in the archery season, and daytime temperatures could get into the 70s. Oh, he found a pinhead size drop of blood on the trail more than 100 yds from the site of the shot, working the river trail on his hands and knees. The ground was so beaten down, and dried out, it was too hard to take a hoof impression. There were too many broken leaves and twigs to see New disturbance, so he used the following the invisible trail approach to look for sign, and finally found the blood droplet. The location told him that the deer was headed towards the upstream ford on the property, so he proceeded on his feet, continuing to look for bruising of the hard dirt, broken twigs, and blood, and found nothing until he got to the softer dirt near the riverbank. He showed me the trail, and the ford and location where the deer had been found months later when I was with him visiting the property.
I have no doubt you have learned something about deer during your years hunting them. I have the advantage of having learned how to track field mice, rabbits, squirrel- both ground and tree-- dogs, cats, and fox, long before I ever was near any area where deer lived, and longer still before my first deer hunts. Compared to field mice, the tracks of a deer( and humans) is about like following the tire tracks of a car or bulldozer through weeds. You have much more to learn, if you will simply get about doing so. :thumbsup:
