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jason brown

hi Nathan, id like to chat about the 7mm amax, I thought id do it here so others might like to read about it or chat about it too.

and now my experience today, which is my first chest shot...
im sitting at my favourite hill top waiting for the goats to turn up.
I find them at 420 yards 11 degree downward angle. at a lull in the wind im working with about a 1moa right to left.
my rifle is the 7mm mag with of course the 162 amax doing 3100, impact was 2466.
this nanny goat was standing fully side on. im guessing around 60kg. iv never weighed one. a typical nanny anyway.
so I take my shot, im feeling like its good. but no thud, it quickly turns down hill then jumps away. so im thinking did I get it? the wind was a bit odd?
it was just in view on the edge of bush and a very steep sidling. so once it jumped or run down I lost sight of it.

so now im thinking this is a long and steep way away, did I get it, should I go all that way it seemed to have run away, and no thud. but I did remember Nathan saying death can be delayed.
(none of this would have been a thought if it was flatter ground with less scrub and I could see)
oh well I better go and at least see if there is a blood trail and follow up from there.
so I loose some gear and get down there.
no obvious blood trail, I keep looking and shortly see it dead about 15-20 meters down hill. even if it jumped/ran 5 metres from poi, a few kicks would of been enough to get it to roll that far down the steep hill. and like I said, if there was less scrub I would have seen it from my hill 420 yards away.

so what do I find. poi was just behind the foreleg,(where I aimed) it was calibre size, it did a good job of saving the meat on the forelegs from what I seen. (this was a long steep trip so the ortopsy and meat gathering was quick as possible ) the lungs looked spotted, but I later realised this was from bullet fragments. there was a lot of "juice" inside mostly from the gut which wouldn't have impressed me if it was a nice deer. from my limited experience I here it taints the meat. my dog didn't seem to mind in this case. I guess as seen as I couldn't find an exit wound, deffinatly not a good size 1 inch one. all the fragments were through out the animals vitals, I didn't see any in the heart though. in easier curcumstances I would have taken more time when .

so on one hand, the meat was in good condition, but the gut juice, which I think came from the fragments wasn't really what I wanted.

I understand at short range the amax projectile may blow up, so head, neck, meat saver shots are recommended.(soft spots) and the time before the head shot at 200 worked well!
in this latest case at 420 yards, on the edge of the bush where I could loose the animal should I have aimed to break the foreleg to anchor the animal, or would this have not been good for projectile performance and not worked as planned?
I know anchoring or dropping it on the spot would have made it easier to know I actually hit it, in this case.(is that even possible at these ranges)
but if I had used a traditional mushrooming projectile would this of not happened because of the stout projectile being too hard to expand at a lower velocity. so am I still better off with the amax even if it might not allways be perfect performance at least it expands/fragments at these kinds of ranges? even if it is delayed
the amax shoots accurately but is it the best choice for long range?
or maybe this was just odd performance and usually the amax performs better?