Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska A Kodiak Bear Hunt

Sitka deer;
Thanks for sharing the great hunt story and photos with us Art, it looks like a grand bear.

Please pass along hearty congratulations to Riley for a job well done and a dandy trophy.

All the best to you and yours this spring Art.

Dwayne

Dwayne
Thank you and may every bit of good will you have ever expressed toward anyone be multipled ten-fold on its return to you and yours!
thanks!
art

Anyone have any idea what might have caused the uniform pattern of marks on the land and groove on the near side of the second photo?

They look like they continue all around the bullet...

I saw the picture in the Vortex thread in the Campfire, and wondered when we'd get the rest of the story.

Good going on Riley's part! But man, I must be getting old, 'cause he looks about ten years older than the last time I saw him, and that wasn't all THAT long ago.

That almost looks like an inside lubed bullet, but for the fact that those look like crimp marks in the middle of the band.

Can you count the number of lands/grooves? If so, why not use calipers to measure the respective width of the best samples and then multiply to get a better estimate of the original circumference.

Scott

If it is indeed a smaller caliber handgun bullet then in my mind it would have had to have been fired from fairly close range to have retained enough velocity to deform it so much. I bet whoever pulled the trigger on that round had a fair amount if adrenaline flowing through his system! I wonder if the bear had its "bell rung"?

Great stuff man! Thanks for sharing!

Sounds like an awesome time and a great hunt, 'twas a great read.

I suspect that slug came out of a jacket, the jacket being the impressing force which transferred the land impressions to the core.

Congrats to you both Art and that was some good shootin' on Rileys part. Any idea as to the bears age?

Way to go guys nice job! Boy has he gotten big since I saw him last.

The bio that sealed the bear, John Kryer (sp???), said it was a mature bear of average skull size, at least 6 and probably a few years older. There were some indications she had cubs in previous years.

Yeah, that super-polite little guy has turned into a World-class wise-ass!

And I have NO idea where he got that! He is shorter than me, still, though!

I think the land engravings on the bullet are too sharp to have been transferred through a jacket. Under magnification there are numerous full-length straitions that I do not think would show the same way if they had been in a jacket. I stick with the notion the bullet was a semi-wadcutter design with a hard shoulder and a solid crimp.

Scott
I was not wild about your idea as I thought the shape of the bullet was pretty obvious and the raw numbers showed the size. After doing as you suggested it suddenly shows a bullet diameter of .34+...

A 357 suddenly looks far more likely than I had thought...
art

As I just posted to Scott Thornley, it looks more like it might have been a 357 diameter bullet and in that case the 357M would seem most likely... Thinking that would lead to a serious bell-ringing...

I have had far worse times, far worse company, and far more miserable conditions... and enjoyed them... Thanks!

Great post - love the recovery of the handgun bullet. Riley will have something to wonder about for the rest of his life about that prior encounter with the handgun. No wonder the bear was making a run for it when he saw Riley!

Congrats!

It definitely looks like a swaged slug of some sort. I have seen some surprisingly sharp rifling impressions on the slugs of bullets which have been shed. A relatively thin-jacketed handgun bullet is sometimes so inclined. I would think that the gun's lands would have scraped their typical striations into the lead had the slug been exposed to the bore. There are too many manufacture marks on that slugs still visible to think that rifling striations would have been smoothed by time or chemical interactions. But, as with so many things so related to these brief impacts, there is often mystery that isn't readily obvious immediately.

Klik
Thinking you just pierced the void...




Those regular marks I was asking about which still show plainly on the lead were likely part of the inside
surface of the jacket to keep them together???
art

Perhaps a hollow point of some sort as well....cause they look so lethally mean, and we all know how important appearance, nomenclature and other details are to bears and other critters.

(Is that myrtle beneath the ejecta?)