The PH I used on the trip wanted to take a gemsbok for meat for the locals and shot one with a 30-06 right at dusk. It took off into some thick brush and we lost the track in the darkness. We could not see the blood with our headlamp and flashlights. We returned with a hound and trackers at first light and took up the track again. I had seen the bullet strike and knew that it must be close. The shot had landed perfectly to take the heart. There were so many other tracks from the night that were over the ones we were tracking that they lost it right away. The hound finally found a track that he liked and took off like a shot dragging the tracker. They were setting a pace that there was no way I could keep up so I went back to the truck which was right where he had fired the shot. I walked over to the truck and got my camelback water bag and started looking blood drop by blood drop following the track, even retracing the ground we had covered the night before. The bigger drops stopped when the trail entered the really thick stuff. I had to be missing something! I put on my reading glasses and got down on my hands and knees and It became clear what we had been missing. The blood had sprayed out as a fine mist and the droplets were so fine that they blended in perfectly with the little red flecks on the rocks and soil that were in the area. Then I looked up and the underside of the mopani brush was covered in blood that looked like someone had hit it with a short blast from a can of spray paint. There was another spray about fifteen feet farther on and they continued on that way for about another 250 yards. There was almost no blood on the ground, it had stuck to the dry leaves and the drops were so small they had dried without ever dropping. I had marked the trail with bits of TP and after the blood stopped completely I kept on carefully following the best looking set of the hundreds of tracks that were there. About 50 yards after the last blood there was one horn tip sticking out of a pile of brush. He had literally run until his heart had pumped out all of his blood, crashing through the brush and finally falling into that pile of brush. I fired a shot to let the tracker and PH know where I was and about fifteen minutes later they returned. When we opened the animal up the bullet had passed through the aorta and stopped under the skin on the off side. With only the one hole it would cover and uncover at each bound, building pressure and releasing like a spray nozzle from a garden hose, mostly going up. Hit like it was it had traveled almost 350 yards in a straight line, crashing through thick brush. A bull elk hit the same way with the same round would not have gone 50 yards. These are some tough animals!
Dakota, I took the Kudu with the .270 also. It was on the same day as the gemsbok in the picture. It was my 55th birthaday. I don't know how much better it can get than that.

It didn't last a day with the village that was attached to the camp. Most was eaten fresh that night and the rest was dried into biltong (jerky) and taken to outlying relatives of the villagers. No meat goes to waste in this part of Africa. Protein is just too valuable.

Ardent, you are welcome to use any thing you want. I would have replied sooner but haven't been here for quite a while.