Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Express Rifles and Big Bores Only The great 458 Winchester. Everyone should own one at least once

I sat in this condominium with 88 y.o. "Geri Harry" (not Dirty Harry mind you) on Saturday and Sunday:



Saturday Harry shot this small buck about 100 yards:



It was a spine shot with a .243 Winchester (born in 1955 a year before the .458 WM)
Ruger M77 and Leupold 1.5-5x20mm in Ruger rings,
handloaded with Speer 100-gr 6mm GrandSlam SP and enough StaBall 6.5 to give +2800 fps MV from the 22" barrel.
Rifle and ammo provided by McGee Acres Game Farm proprietor.
The deer dropped like a sack of rocks.



No outwardly visible entrance wound and a small spot of blood visible as exit wound.
Small bit of backstrap meat loss.
Sunday Harry shot a doe, again at about 100 yards.
It was hit in a single lung(right side) and then into gut on left side.
It went down then bounced up and ran off, about 100 yards into a cedar thicket and dropped for good.
Harry was satisfied with enough backstrap for taking back to the Florida Keys by return flight Tuesday,
allowing Monday for solid freezing of meat.

So Sunday afternoon I left Harry in the condominium blind
and walked a few hundred yards west to a ladder stand:



Right before sundown a doe popped out of a cedar thicket only 50 yards away and was reflexively shot with the .458 WinMag.



She was hit in the left side, low in chest, getting only both sides of lungs and ribs, no heart, great vessels nor shoulder bones nor meat.
She went straight up in the air a few feet upon bullet impact and then ran as if uninjured, back into the cedar thicket.
I blood trailed her for 50 yards up a low hill and then lost the blood in the darkness,
and besides, Harry showed up. Making sure he did not fall in the woods,
I decided to let the deer wait until morning, since it was frosting heavily overnight.

Entrance wound of 404-gr/.458 Shock Hammer at 2468 fps MV, 50-yard impact:



Exit wound may have been augmented overnight by a 'possum nibbling on its edges,
but otherwise no meat was lost. Doe was found lying like this, exit wound up:



Moral of the story is that a double-lunged deer might go 100 yards whether shot with
a .243 Winchester and 100-gr Speer GrandSlam impacting about 2700 fps
or a .458 Winchester Magnum and 404-gr Shock Hammer impacting about 2400 fps.
Whitetail does are about as tenacious to life as a cape buffalo,
they just do not offer as much resistance to bullet.