Gut shot with a solid

[JW1987]

I was taking an evening walk up my half mile long driveway. It covers woods and my farm fields. I enjoy doing this after supper and always carry a rifle for times like this. I was watching a couple hen turkeys about 200yds out in the corner of last years bean field. All of a sudden one flies and the others run off at full speed. Now I know I didn't spook them and get to looking around and see a big yote somewhere about 100-150 yds out. I can't use the bipod because of a rise in between me and it. So I try an off hand shot and pull it and hit it far back in the guts. I see it roll in the scope and take off toward the wood line. The rifle is a 6 creed and I just so happen to have some 90gr Hornady cx rounds in it. Now I went to the spot I shot it but there is no blood, I know I hit the thing, I watched it roll. What are the chances the bullet didn't expand at all and put a pencil hole in one side and out the other? I went to the wood line and heard something crashing through the brush but wasn't able to find anything. I guess I'll just look for buzzards then go where they are to see if it is the yote. What are y'all's thoughts?

 

[338 dude]

I was taking an evening walk up my half mile long driveway. It covers woods and my farm fields. I enjoy doing this after supper and always carry a rifle for times like this. I was watching a couple hen turkeys about 200yds out in the corner of last years bean field. All of a sudden one flies and the others run off at full speed. Now I know I didn't spook them and get to looking around and see a big yote somewhere about 100-150 yds out. I can't use the bipod because of a rise in between me and it. So I try an off hand shot and pull it and hit it far back in the guts. I see it roll in the scope and take off toward the wood line. The rifle is a 6 creed and I just so happen to have some 90gr Hornady cx rounds in it. Now I went to the spot I shot it but there is no blood, I know I hit the thing, I watched it roll. What are the chances the bullet didn't expand at all and put a pencil hole in one side and out the other? I went to the wood line and heard something crashing through the brush but wasn't able to find anything. I guess I'll just look for buzzards then go where they are to see if it is the yote. What are y'all's thoughts?

No experience with the CX, doubt a pencil through If you were that close the velocities should still be high. It's just a gut shot they run a ways when that happens.

 

[JW1987]

I was thinking since there isn't much back there that it may not have expanded.

 

[VinceMule]

My preferred coyote bullet in cases from 6XC, 6x47, 243 Win, 6 Rem, and 243 AI are several that give excellent terminal performance:

60g Sierra HP
70g Nosler ballistic tip
80g Sierra Blitz BT

Any copper bullet would not be my first choice, but you may be in a state where you must use them.

I have skinned a lot of coyotes, but not much to them when the hide is off.

 

[JW1987]

I know it was not a good choice of bullet. It's just what I had in the mag at the time. I rarely see anything worth shooting at so didn't think about what was in it

 

[VinceMule]

JW, you got him, but you did not "get" him! Another dead fawn killer! Congrats!

 

[JW1987]

Like I said, I know I hit it. I was just surprised by not finding any blood. But I have had several gunshot deer not bleed either.

 

[338 dude]

And intestine can block the hole

 

[JW1987]

That is what I am thinking. Only reason I wish it hadn't run off was so I could take a pic of it.
As long is it is dead, I succeeded. It was stalking those birds and I prefer to keep them around.

 

[TRnCO]

their fur soaks up a lot of blood and not much in the gut area to bleed to start with. If you did hit it in the guts, I'm not surprised at not finding any blood. It's dead, but how far it ran is anybody's guess.

 

[Dean2]

We used to shoot yotes with 147 grain FMJ boat tails pulled from 7.62 Nato surplus ammo and loaded into 300 Win Mags. We did that so we could shoot them out to the half mile line. It also meant we still would have good pelts no matter how close they were. If you hit them too far back you did have some tracking to do, but we always shot them with snow on the ground so you did eventually catch up to them. The other cartridge we used a lot was the 22-250 with 40 grain Vmax and 55 grain SPSX. These were very explosive bullets that rarely exited, if they did however no amount of sewing would fix the exit hole. Even hit with one of those, if you gut shot the yote, it would still go quite a ways and they were much harder to track because there was no exit hole.

My bet is the buzzards will locate the carcass for you in no more than a day.

 

[Rosebud]

There's more in the guts to make a bullet expand than in the lungs. But they don't need the guts to keep living for the next couple of hours. Besides, its a coyote. It's dead, and bio degradable.

 

[codyadams]

I will agree that guts are denser than lungs. Lungs are just air filled moist sponges. Stomach and intestines, aside from being more material in and of themselves than lungs, will also be full of everything that dogs been eating. Especially on deer species, the stomach is full of wet grass, which does a fantastic job at slowing/stopping a bullet.

Without seeing the coyote, there is absolutely no way to know what the bullet did. In making statements, or more guesses, as to what the bullet did, one needs to be careful, as that quickly can turn into assigning terminal performance characteristics to a bullet that have no foundation ir merit. I'm not saying or believe that you are, however situations like this is how false pretenses about bullets can be made. Even if it did pencil through, the only way to know is to recover the animal.

I once shot a coyote with my 16" ar, 55 grain v-max bullets at about 250 yards. He was running, and I hit back in the guts. As someone said previously, his intestines plugged the exit, and were actually dragging on the snow. As I followed them, I didn't hardly find any blood, even in the snow, just a little yellow tint to the snow from the damp intestine. He ran about 300 yards before he finally died, I was blown away. Terminal performance is a crazy thing that often still surprises me!

 

[JW1987]

Thanks for the responses guys. I was not trying to make it a terminal ballistics thing. I know it was the wrong bullet for that application and am not trying to make it about that. I just wondered if the planets aligned and the bullet did pencil through, that my assumption that there was going to be little to no blood, was correct. As stated by others, it seems as though there can be little to no blood with the gut shot. This is the second dog I've ever shot at. The first was gracefully missed about 15 years ago and a bad shot on this one.