TheKid;
Good evening to you sir, I hope that the week has been a good one for you and your fine family.

Thinking back on a few hunts, I've ended up having no shot but a neck shot on a few whitetail bucks but can't recall if I've shot mulie bucks there or not.

I do recall shooting at least a couple mulie bucks either in the ear hole as you mentioned or a couple between the eyes as they stuck their heads up over a sagebrush.

On whitetail, this one was trotting straight towards me in a grown in cut block, so as you mentioned I put the crosshairs where the neck and the front legs come together and broke two vertebrae. That silly bullet then clipped the top of a lung, bounced back through a full grass bag and ended up underneath the hide on it's left butt cheek.

Standard sort of 2nd rack Okanagan whitetail.

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The butt cheek bullet is the one on the right - 167.5gr .308" TSX started out at 3150 or so.

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This buck came from the same cut block 3 years later. It came in through the replanted Doug Firs like it was on a string to my second series of grunt calls. Was super still that morning so perfect for calling. Anyways we can see the trickle of blood on the neck. I hit it as it cleared enough of the Doug Fir to give me a good shot.

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Same rifle, same bullet but this time it left the deer and went into the great beyond.

This one died within a kilometer of the two above, but in '92 so 20 years before that - maybe '93?? I'd have to check. I was poking through the timber, this thing snorted and flagged, but stopped when I let out a loud bleat. When I looked through the binos, I saw it's brow tines and thought, "Oh nice, a little spiker" so I brought up the rifle and slid one in a couple inches below the base of the skull.

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Funny when you look at the racks close from the '90's and from the 2012 one you can clearly see they're related. Sort of neat how that happens even over decades.

Anyways those were three times that I used neck shots where I took a photo of the buck afterwards. Since we process our own game we might not lose as much meat as if a commercial meat cutter had to poke through it, but I'm guessing on that.

All the best to you all and good luck on your hunts.

Dwayne

The most important stuff in life isn't "stuff"