Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters A real head-scratcher in the field on Saturday...

Still haven't figured this one out.

Yearling button buck broadside out 70 yards, or so. Zinged him with a 140-gr. InterLock from the trusty M70 (.270 WCF). Looks like a typical heart-lung shot. Deer does the bronco kick and commences the death dash, so I'm almost positive I got a piece of him.

Wait a bit and then go looking for him, but no blood. I'm pretty sure he piled up just out of sight so I head in that general direction. Find him under a tree he dove under and turn him over...entry right where I wanted it but...no exit wound on the opposite side. Hmmmmm...

When I get him hanging up I notice the bullet has apparently taken a hard turn astern upon contact and exited along the bottom edge of the ribcage going straight back. Weirder still, I immediately smell stomach acid upon my first cut. So, I unzip him and lo and behold his gut has been ruptured somehow. On top of all this, all the ribs are intact...the InterLock didn't penetrate whatsoever, but somehow a) killed him, and b) churned his guts up.

I was extremely baffled and a bit ticked off considering the solid shot placement (I hate dressing out a deer with a body cavity full of stomach contents). If I hadn't killed a goodly number of deer with this same bullet over the years, they'd be going on the shelf, post haste. But, I guess I'll just chalk it up to a fluke and carry on.

Ideas or thoughts?

Thanks,
Scott

I had a similar thing happen with a .25 cal 100 grain Nosler BT, a number of years ago. A doe standing broadside 200 yards away was hit perfectly behind the shoulder, and the bullet exited out the bottom of the belly. Only one drop of blood, and she ran a good 100 yards, even though one lung and the heart were damaged. The bullet hit a rib going in, and all I could figure is it deflected and tumbled. I did later learn that particular bullet was considered a "varmint" bullet, but I also wasn't launching it very fast, either. After that episode I decided 115's were my friend in the .25-06!

It's surprising that your 140gr Interlocks would not have penetrated straight. Any chance you hit a twig, so the bullet was tumbling when it arrived?

Only case I ever saw like that is bullet hit limb first and was unstable when it hit so it lost directional stability. Twas a broadsider with no bones hit but bullet ended up 2/3s way up neck after taking off top of heart.
Did not expand right either, sort of smuushed in a half circle.
Turned out it hit 3/4" limb first. 130 .277 gr old Barnes X.

Good news is "dead is dead!"

Here's another. Shot a medium doe behind the shoulder (broadside shot) a little high at about 100 yards with a 180 grain GameKing from a .30-'06. She went about 30 yards. Entered lungs and then the bullet made a sharp left turn, took out the top of the liver and continued south and was found between the rear quarters, almost dead center. Didn't even nick a gut. Weird stuff does happen, lots of uncontrolled and uncontrollable variables when shooting animals.

I hunted at my friend's place in North Carolina for 18 years. The last year there, I had my new .300 WSM custom. I was in a stand and a buck walked out at 450 yards. He had walked into the field from a hunt club. I put the cross hair on his nose and shot. I hit him in the center of the chest and he went down. The fog lifted and I saw a doe come into the field as well. I dropped her. I got back to clean the deer. The buck had a perfect .270 bullet, a 6mm bullet and 3 pieces of buckshot in him. He survived all of that and healed up. I had a .270 briefly that I shot 2 deer with: one at 75 yds and the other at 200 and it damaged more meat than I had ever seen before. The entire front half of the deer was grape jelly. It always struck me that a bullet that could do such damage would be sitting there in my deer without any expansion at all. Your case doesn't sound a whole lot stranger. Bullets do funny things once they enter the body, especially long thin ones that tumble and go off in strange directions. That was a big observation with the .223 when they developed it for the military. My buddy shot a deer with a bow two months ago and the arrow went in, hit a rib, turned and came out the deer's butt. You got an exit hole so you'll never know the condition of the bullet. That would bee nice to see. I wouldn't put a lot of thought into paunching the deer. I've shot a bunch square in the shoulder that blew the paunch, sometimes to green oatmeal. I've hit deer with the .300 perfect, and had everything inside scrambled.

I shot this buck last year at 75 yards. He was perfectly broadside and I put it in his heart with a Remington 150 grain CoreLokt factory load. The bullet turned inside and exited out his chest (see the blood spot on the chest in the picture). I never figured it out either, but he did drop on the spot, dead when he hit the ground.

Bullets do weird things sometimes, that's for sure. I once shot a large (200 pounds) eight point wt at about thirty yards with a 140 grain BT out of a 7mm RM. All that was showing out of the brush was the head and neck and I hit center neck, perfectly broadside. The deer dropped so fast he was upright when I got there, his legs folded under him and his antlers pitched forward and stuck in the ground. I walked around to the off side to turn him over and saw a little spot of blood high on the off side shoulder. I felt a lump, poked and pried with my knife a little, and there under the hide was my 140 grain BT, now weighing 70 grains. Another time I hit a smaller WT doe high in the shoulder with a 400 grain Speer FNSP out of a hot rod .45--70 load. As expected there was a big entrance, big exit, but when I unzipped her, there was the bullet jacket under the skin of the brisket.

Odessa, is that an M88 you got there? Tom

Sure looks like one, doesn't it? A .308, judging from the bullet weight he cited. Great rifles.

The weirdest one I've ever seen was on a Cape buffalo that another guy shot. There were two PH's, the hunter, a tracker, and me, photographing the hunt. We got up on a herd of about 30, and at 100 yards the guy shot the herd bull broadside, right in the shoulder, 1/3 of the way up the body, with a 300-grain Trophy Bonded Bear Claw (the Federal version) from a .375 H&H. We all saw the dust fly where the bullet hit.

The bull bucked and ran behind some thorn trees. We just stood still, waiting for the rest of the herd to move off, expecting to hear the death bellow of the bull at any moment. When that didn't happen, we waited for the herd to move off, then waited a full hour after the shot before starting to track the bull. (By now I had exchanged my camera for my 9.3x62 with solids.)

Maybe 75 yards into the brush a buffalo bull jumped up and ran deeper into the brush ahead of me. I couldn't tell if it was wounded or not, so didn't even try to shoot--and may not have had time anyway. I waved the other guys over and the tracker soon found blood, so it was the wounded bull.

The brush got REAL thick after that, so the PH's told me and the hunter to stay behind and stand on top of a big termite mound, so we could maybe spot the bull (or shoot it) if it took off. They went in with the tracker and over the next half we heard 11 shots. Finally the tracker came back and said the bull was dead.

It turned out the bullet had broken the shoulder, right where we saw it hit--but then had somehow deflected before it hit the heart, then curved through the near lung, ending up under the hide at the rear of the ribcage, on the same side it entered. It had expanded perfectly and could have been used for an advertisement--but it only damaged the near lung, and a Cape buffalo can live a long time with one lung!

The 11 shots we heard, by the way, were all from a .416 Rigby and a .458 Express, a little longer version of the .458 Lott.

Here is my one weird bullet story. One rifle season I was in a climbing tree stand overlooking a big oak flat in the Ozark timber with a Marlin M1895 .45-70 in hand. The rifle was stoked with Winchester factory loaded 300 gr. hollow points. A nice eight point walked into the flat about 115 yards below me. I could see the buck clearly and he was absolutely broadside going from left to right. A sharp whistle stopped him. I busted that buck perfectly on the right shoulder, that high shoulder shot that drops them right in their tracks. The buck stiffened out, sorta like he was stretching, and just slowly and stiffly toppled over on his left side. When I got to him and looked him over I was surprised to see an exit would high up on the left side of his neck. Later after skinning I saw the bullet had hit the right side shoulder and penetrated to the spine, turned hard right and wallowed along the spine through the neck, then took a sharp left through the spine and exited way up high near the back of the head. The bullet path was a very long �Z� shape and the corners were sharply turned. I thought that odd behavior for a big old fairly slow chunk of lead.

Yeah, they're still argueing about JFK.

I always mark those up to s--t happens...I have seen some wierd stuff.

Get over gutting gut shot deer, no biggie, just wash them out as soon as possible, changes nothing contrary to popular belief..they still eat good if you get them washed or at least wiped out good...

Orion,
Nothing unusual about JFK, a bunch of suedo goverment balistic experts came up with a bunch of crap ideas. That bullet did exactly what one would expect a long penetrating bullet like that to do..If the Gov had left the investigation to the old Dallas Hat Squad that investigated 30 shootings a day instead of letting the Secret Service do the investigation, the agents first homicide btw, and a doctor who had never done an autopsy and tossed the brain, and they should have stuffed a sock in that La. Attys mouth, none of that crap would have come out..It was all politics and shame for fame.

I completely agree on the meat aspect of it. Never a problem. I just don't like getting all that stomach acid swill on my purty little hands and arms.

Pretty good stuff there atkinson.

I have tried to explain on other threads, premiums or C&C don't always act as advertised.

My weird one was watching my buddy shoot a fork Mule Deer buck at about 50 yards with 200 gr Accubond out of .300 RUM. The deer was broadside and hit right on the shoulder. The bullet defelected straight down and went out the bottom of the chest. There was a baseball size hole in near arm pit and the lung was dragging out the bottom of the deer as it walked 50-60 yards and laid down where it was finished with .270 (bud was so convinced it would be dead when he got there he left his gun sitting with packs and had to borrow mine when we walked up to it). Normally 200 gr bullets are straight line diggers out of the .30 Cals, but funny stuff happens.

Lou

A 180 grain Nosler Combined Technology broadside on a 6 x 6 bull elk - hit the right side 5th rib back mid heighth, literally threw him down, and never touched the left side of the body cavity. Excellent performance as he was dead right there, but we found no sign of the slug.

How long did it take for you to recover?

I'm two for two with 130 Interbonds out of my .270 doing the right angle turn into the guts thing. A decent buck this weekend and a doe a couple years ago. Both broadside at about 150 yards and both went down right away. Another who doesn't like stomach contents scattered around!