The bigger doe I shot on Saturday? There was no exit wound due to the angle I shot it at. Thus I knew the bullet was inside the deer and I wanted to recover it. We didn’t find it Saturday evening so I figured it was gone.

Not so!

Josh Storm emailed me this morning with a picture:

He said he found it lying on the slab where the deer was cleaned. So, we can’t know exactly how far it penetrated and where it came to rest. And tho the picture is a little blurry, you can see there’s perfect expansion, petals curled back, looks like no loss of petals. Looks great!

That’s a Barnes Bullet 85 grain .277″ TSX bullet (out of a Silver State Armory 6.8 SPC Barnes 85 grain TSX tactical load). That’s performance. I know it struck a shoulder, took care of the heart and lungs, and went in pretty deep after that. Solid performance there. The other doe was DRT but exit wound so no recovered bullet.

Josh is going to mail me the bullet. I’ll check it out more when it gets here.

But this is why I prefer Barnes Bullets for hunting. Always had solid, reliable performance with them. You can go “smaller” on the bullet than tradition would warrant for X-particular game, and things work out well.

Updated: The bullet came in the mail. Here’s some pictures:

I weighed the bullet on my beam scale. The bullet is about 85.0 grains, +/- 0.1 grain. I tried weighing it at 84.9 and 85.1 and both were not centered. 85.0 wasn’t precisely centered either but was the closest. So assuming about 85.0 grains from a fresh bullet hey… looks like we’ve got essentially 100% weight retention in addition to perfect expansion.

The only thing I wish I knew was where the bullet came to rest so we could measure penetration and perhaps path/deflection. Oh well, another day I guess.