My .243 has only killed four deer. Back when I lived in a small Nevada town. I taught some of my neighbor's kids how to shoot and when deer season opened, I'd take one along to take their first deer. Rifle was a Kodiak Mauser rebarreled to .243. Not a very pretty thing but accurate as hell. I gave it to a friend's son when I moved to Arizona. Anyway, four lucky kids got to hunt with that rifle. We hunted on a private ranch which made it nice. Results were as follows. One deer DRT, two ran from about 30 to 50 yards and one ran over 250 yards running into a fence, backing up and hitting the fence two more times before finally expiring. Each deer was autopsied to see how the load worked. One that deer that ran such a long distance after the shot, the heart and lungs were literally jello. I have no idea what kept that deer on its feet for so long.
The load was a 100 gr. Hornady spire point, don't remember if it was interlock or pre-interlock, over a stiff charge of 4350. It was my pet coyote load FWIW. I forget which. When we moved here to Tucson, a couple of boxes of shooting stuff never made it here. Dunno if the moving company lost it or someone on the truck helped themselves. One of the missing boxes held all my reloading note from when I first started back in 1954.
PJ
