RIFLES
A Case for Expansion
Many of today's hunters seek tough 'premium' bullets for deer-size game. Has the pendulum swung too far?
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On my last evening in western Kentucky I set up along a tree line overlooking a relatively flat alfalfa field. The saplings edging the field didn't provide much cover, but the wind was in my face and the far tree line was 260 yards away, so I figured if I sat fairly still I'd be okay.
I was hunting on Thompson/Center's Game Trails outfit near Sturgis, in the Ohio River Valley, and it was just a fun evening anyway. On opening morning, a few days earlier, I'd taken a nice buck with an Encore chambered to the new .30 TC. Now it was my turn to try the company's new bolt-action Icon. Kentucky has a one-buck limit, but the license has a long string of doe tags, and these folks were trying to reduce their doe population.
The rifle was chambered to .308 Winchester, and I was shooting factory 150-grain loads. At about 4:15 a group of does came out along the far tree line. They were clear across the field, so I slowly dropped into a prone position. My intent was to shoot only mature does, so I sized them up carefully and shot the largest animal just behind the shoulder on a slightly quartering shot. She ran to the left as if nothing had happened, and I lost her behind a little finger of cover.
I had zeroed the rifle with this load and I was sure of the hold, so I assumed she would be down on the edge of the field. Remembering that my mission was to test rifles and reduce deer, I stayed put.
A half-hour later another group fed out into the open, and I did exactly the same thing. Almost the same thing happened, except this was a broadside shoulder shot, and the deer ran straight away into the far woods, where I quickly lost her white flag. I had plenty of shooting light and might have helped their deer problem a bit more, but now I was spooked. Had I missed? Was the rifle off? I figured I'd better go look before I lost the light.
It was a good call. I found blood from the first deer right away, but she had gone more than 100 yards into the darkening woods. By the time I dragged her near the edge the light was failing, and it was a chore to find the other deer. She was also a good 100 yards into the woods, and both deer had identical caliber-size entrance and exit wounds. I had simply punched holes through them, and I was fortunate to find them before it got dark.
No, I will not tell you what bullet I was shooting. Bullet makers are too sensitive, and findings from just a couple of animals are too subjective. Let's just say it was a factory bullet from a major manufacturer, designed to hold together and hold its weight as it penetrates. This in itself is not a bad thing, and it's a very good thing if you're shooting larger game that requires a lot of penetration. But, c'mon, a 150-grain bullet from a .308 is a deer bullet. Deer (and deer-size game) do not require vast amounts of penetration, and they go down faster when bullet expansion does significant damage to their vitals.
Rather than castigate that particular bullet, which did exactly what it is designed to do, I'd rather say that this is a classic example of a disturbing trend in hunting bullets, and it's not the fault of the folks who make bullets.
Hunting bullets have come a long, long way in recent decades. Bullet performance today is awesome, but the array available is bewildering. None of us, including me, can claim even passing knowledge of all the great hunting bullets out there, but thanks to a lot of very successful marketing hype, many of us insist on ever-tougher bullets that will hold together and retain almost all of their original weight. Such bullets are excellent in some applications, but we demand these bullets even if they aren't the best fit for the hunting we are doing.
In this we have come full circle. Jacketed bullets and smokeless powder were actually parallel developments because lead projectiles couldn't stand up to the velocities made possible by the new propellants. Early expanding bullets were often unreliable, expanding too quickly and thus failing to penetrate. There were two solutions: use non-expanding "solid" bullets to ensure penetration, accepting the limited tissue damage of a narrow through-and-through wound channel, or get a bigger hammer.
