After hunting big game for 46 years now, and having another 150 hunters in camp primarily for deer, antelope, and aoudad, I've actually seen most every kind of impact imaginable. The last "no man's land" impact happened to a nice guy from Illinois who was out here hunting aoudad. He brought a 300 Weatherby, and drilled a big ram high behind the shoulder at a distance of less than 200 yards. The ram dropped like a sack of rocks, and we watched for at least a couple of minutes, then commenced giving high fives. I told him to make his way over to the ram while I watched from where he had shot. He didn't take more that 10 steps when the big ram got to his feet and scrambled off before the hunter could get another shot off. We crossed the narrow canyon, got to where the ram was laying, found a little blood, not a lot, followed along a while, and never saw the ram again.
JG,
There is no “void”, “no mans land”, etc. between the spine and lungs. The spine comes down into the chest cavity, and when the lungs aren’t attached to the chest wall at the top it’s called a pneumothorax, and it’s lethal. The lungs are attached to the chest wall- bottom to top, on all sides- by a mucus like membrane called the pleura. The lungs come up and slightly above the spine -as viewed form the side. In other words to hit the bottom edge of the spine, you also hit the very top of the lungs.
What people- all people- that thinks they hit in no mans land actually did is hit above the spine, nicking one of the spinous processes. The spine falls pretty deep into the chest, and what we see on the outside as the “spine” is actually the spinal processes.
Again- medically, there is no gap between lungs and spine.
