Two deer, totally different results

[Cbriggs57]

What a difference a week makes. I shot a small deer a week and a half ago with my TC Hawken 54 cal, Hornady Great Plains Bullet and 90 gr 777. Hit the neck at 35-ish yards. Oddly, didn't seem to break the spine, but it was DRT, and I had to look for entrance and exit holes.
One week later, my oldest son, using the same gun and load, shot a huge doe at fifteen FEET, and she ran 500 yards. Hit was through the lungs, just above the heart, with an impressive exit hole. Just shows ta go ya that hunting is not totally predictable. Every hunt is a story all its own.

 

[jackley]

Seen it happen with elk many times. Same shoulder shot, some DRT some run a long ways.

Jerry

 

[Zonie]

There is a real difference with the elk.

Elk always run into the deepest, most impenetrable canyon they can find in the area before dying.

 

[PGTMG]

Deer head for swamps and thorn bushes that put barbwire to shame :grin:

 

[daniel collums]

an't that the truth!

 

[Len Graves]

The best way I know to get lost---sorry " turned around" in the woods is to trail a wounded deer into the swamp at dusk. To shoot one at fifteen feet, do you think the blast helped move the deer the 300 yds.? Just joking! That's what hunting is all about. You have to remember," they are full time deer and we are part time hunters". Carry on the tradition.

 

[GANGGREEN]

I killed a small antlerless deer about a week ago with my .50 flintlock at less than 15 yards broadside. When struck, she flagged and bounded off slowly, appearing for all the world as if there was not a hair amiss. I just shook my head, wondering if it was even remotely possible that I had missed at that range. I shouldn't have worried because I heard her crash about 10 seconds later and only 30 or 40 yards away (she had paused to look back at one point), but it's truly amazing to me that you can double lung a very small deer at that range and have it bound off at all.

That said, after hunting with flintlocks for nearly 30 years and probably harvesting around 20 deer with them, I've still only had ONE deer drop in its tracks when hit with a roundball. I see stories about guys who have never had to trail one and I just scratch my head because my experience is that they almost always run off and almost never leave a good blood trail.

 

[Cbriggs57]

Got to talk with my son more extensively today. The 425 gr Great Plains bullet went in one shoulder, hit the off-side scapula, made a nearly 90* turn up the neck, only stopping at the base of the skull. Even cracked the skull, yet the deer ran over 500 yards. Even my 79 year-old father had never seen such a thing.

 

[Britsmoothy]

And with a huge headache!!

Just another example why a ft/lb figure is nothing to go off! In my opinion.

B.

 

[robinsroost]

I shot one once, when I still lived in Florida, that was feeding on, fallen, ripe cabbage palm berries. He humped up at the shot, and ran a 30 yard circle and collapsed close to here he was at the shot. The strangest thing I had ever seen and when I walked up to him I saw that he only had three legs. His right front leg had been shot off.........robin :wink: