Thread: Anzac Day Sambar

With the promise of a good day we set off for a morning hunt before checking some camera's that hadn't been looked at for a few weeks. Beeman dropped me off at a spot that has a mix of clear cut and openish pine which we hadn't checked for some time.
As I walked up the track in the pre dawn I noticed fresh deer marks in a couple of places which was encouraging to see. From the track end I climbed up towards the clear cut, passing a rut pad from a red stag which hadn't been used recently. As I carefully approached the open area I heard a branch break out in the open, two to three steps later I seen a sambar stag starring at me, he was standing 25 yards away against a white misty backdrop. The rifle was up and I had seconds to decide, was he big enough, I decided yes and squeezed the trigger of my 300 Win Mag. He went straight down with the neck shot and as he was on top of a steep sidling slid about 10 yards before coming to rest.
Once I reached him it was plane to see we had a lot of meat to shift and that he had a reasonable head.
I radioed Beeman but he had left his radio in the truck so it was over an hour before he answered my calls. While waiting I tried to move him into a better position for photo's but no way on my own he was to big. I ran my tape quickly over his antlers and found he was 27 inches long, 12 inch brows, about 24 wide with a span of about 18 inches, cornet 9 and the beam was close to 5.5 inches so a rough guess he around the 170 DS.
Once Beeman arrived the work began, Beeman decided the head skin was a cracker and could be used for his big 206 DS Sambar so we set about head skinning him, then we removed all the quarters and back steaks and ferried them all back to the truck. After several hours we were pretty happy to have him on the back of the truck.
The bullet I was using was a 178 gr ELD X , I hit him in the neck below the throat and the bullet was recovered from the skin on the off side, total penetration was about 8 inches , the bullet retained it's lead and mushroomed perfectly. Gotta love those ELD X bullets. One thing is for sure those Sambar Stag are one tough creature the skin on his neck was over quarter inch thick and the neck muscles and bone would just about stop a lesser caliber bullet.
While the Sambar rut is a ways off we have started to notice several Sambar Stags turn up on our camera lines so roll on the Sambar rut.