Keith
Member
I had an odd experience this morning. The weather was nice for hunting so I kept my twelve year old, Connor, out of school and off we went.
We were up on a steep mountain ridge at dawn and had a group of three or four deer about 150 yards below us. We waited until it was light enough to shoot and Connor picked out a good sized doe standing broadside and let loose with his .243. It was still a bit dark, but I watched the deer roll over in the high grass; gray-brown-gray-brown ... Dead deer, I figured.
Except, the deer sprang back up a few yards from where I'd seen her go down and began limping from left to right through the brush. Connor whacked her again and she dropped. It was odd because the deer had seemed to spring up several yards from where it had gone down, but the grass was chest high down in the swale where they were, so... whatever.
When he shot, a number of other deer that we hadn't seen, materialized and ran off. There were maybe ten in a fifty yard radius, hidden in the brush and high grass.
We went on down and found a young spike buck with a badly broken front leg (broken just below the shoulder and hanging on by just a bit of meat...). It also had an odd wound in its face near the eye - like a stab wound, and a good shot through the ribs that had finally put him down. I could have swore it was a doe he had shot and Connor was sure that this wasn't the deer he had first shot - the doe had been a fat old girl, and this spike was pretty gangly and the angle was wrong for that first shot. Yet, we had been above them and the light was at least fair, so I just couldn't figure it out how we could have missed anything that went on...
Connor started doing circuits around the area on his own while I began boning the deer. A few minutes later he called me over and showed me a blood trail leading down the hill. We followed it down a ways and found an enormously fat old doe piled up in a ravine 200 yards or so down the mountain. She had been shot through the base of the neck - a high shot that had missed the spine, but bled her out.
The only thing I can figure is that the spike was in the high grass behind the big doe. I think maybe the face wound was from the bullet jacket, and the leg wound from the slug itself. It was a Nosler partition which will sometimes separate in two like that when it hits bone. It will separate at the partition and throw the front half off like a piece of shrapnel while the base drives on through like a normal bullet. I poked around in the spikes face, but whatever had made the wound wasn't there - just bounced off the bone beneath.
Two for the price of one - or not really, since he had to shoot the spike twice... Impressive bullet performance though since the wounds on both deer were fairly massive!
Keith
We were up on a steep mountain ridge at dawn and had a group of three or four deer about 150 yards below us. We waited until it was light enough to shoot and Connor picked out a good sized doe standing broadside and let loose with his .243. It was still a bit dark, but I watched the deer roll over in the high grass; gray-brown-gray-brown ... Dead deer, I figured.
Except, the deer sprang back up a few yards from where I'd seen her go down and began limping from left to right through the brush. Connor whacked her again and she dropped. It was odd because the deer had seemed to spring up several yards from where it had gone down, but the grass was chest high down in the swale where they were, so... whatever.
When he shot, a number of other deer that we hadn't seen, materialized and ran off. There were maybe ten in a fifty yard radius, hidden in the brush and high grass.
We went on down and found a young spike buck with a badly broken front leg (broken just below the shoulder and hanging on by just a bit of meat...). It also had an odd wound in its face near the eye - like a stab wound, and a good shot through the ribs that had finally put him down. I could have swore it was a doe he had shot and Connor was sure that this wasn't the deer he had first shot - the doe had been a fat old girl, and this spike was pretty gangly and the angle was wrong for that first shot. Yet, we had been above them and the light was at least fair, so I just couldn't figure it out how we could have missed anything that went on...
Connor started doing circuits around the area on his own while I began boning the deer. A few minutes later he called me over and showed me a blood trail leading down the hill. We followed it down a ways and found an enormously fat old doe piled up in a ravine 200 yards or so down the mountain. She had been shot through the base of the neck - a high shot that had missed the spine, but bled her out.
The only thing I can figure is that the spike was in the high grass behind the big doe. I think maybe the face wound was from the bullet jacket, and the leg wound from the slug itself. It was a Nosler partition which will sometimes separate in two like that when it hits bone. It will separate at the partition and throw the front half off like a piece of shrapnel while the base drives on through like a normal bullet. I poked around in the spikes face, but whatever had made the wound wasn't there - just bounced off the bone beneath.
Two for the price of one - or not really, since he had to shoot the spike twice... Impressive bullet performance though since the wounds on both deer were fairly massive!
Keith
