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john feyereisn

Last weekend my brother shot at a whitetail buck and we could not recover it and I am thinking outloud about what went wrong. He was shooting my hand loads in his 22 inch barrelled 270, 55 grains of imr 4350 with 130 partitions, which should be pretty deadly. the deer was broadside at about 80 yards, and he said it bucked and ran off at the shot. He was sitting on a sturdy swivel chair in a stand with a pretty solid railing, He was pretty confident he made a good hit, and it was a pretty easy shot, I find it hard to beleive he would have made a poor hit but I also have a hard time believing the deer took the bullet throught the vitals and went as far as it did.

We found a steady but not profuse blood trail and followed it for 600 yds untill we lost the trail, he chose to pursue the deer quickly due to the fact that it was snowing very hard and it was covering the blood, in hindsight I would have let the deer sit for a time then followed, but the choice was a rock or a hard place. we did circles with a group the following day starting where we found the last blood but never found anything else.

The way he said it bucked does it sound like maybee he hit it behind the vitals?