I have mentioned this incident before on another thread but since it so closely relates to your question I'll risk it again.
A friend and I jumped a young bull just like a quail in some opened timber on a hillside. This all happened in about 5 to 7 seconds as I remember. He got up straight away at first and and my friend's .338 Barnes X caught him immediately in the seat of the pants; he immediately veered to my right when my first shot caught him - directly in the chest I thought; as he continued on he took a second then a third and was down only about 30 - 40 yards from where he was bedded. It was almost like working a pump shotgun on a flushing pheasant such was the quick succession of shots from my friend and myself. At the first shot, I was vaguely aware of some fine brush in the scope between the bull and myself but only in retrospect.
Anyway, upon dressing the bull there were two entrances holes in the chest, through and through and the one in the seat had fractured his pelvis and lodged up along his spine. So we had accounted for three of the four shots. Upon further inspection his large grass-filled stomach - bigger than a basketball - had a bullet hole in it such that it appeared to have entered side ways with a slight bend to it, sort of a boomerang shape. Fishing through the soupy mess brought out a 225-gr Nosler Partition whole, marked only by the rifling but bent slightly at the waist. Further scrounging found the matching entrance hole on the inside of his hide. What happened to that bullet? Well about thirty minutes of looking and back tracking found the brush I had vaguely been aware of at my first shot and yes there among these uniformly sized twigs of maybe a quarter to a third of an inch in diameter was a freshly fractured one. Why not deformation of the nose of the bullet but instead the impact seemingly at the "waist" of the bullet I'll never know but the said Nosler was handloaded to about 3000 fps out of a .340 Weatherby and the cross hairs had been on his chest not another foot or more back on his paunch. So much for brush busting.
George
