[Double Naught Spy]

I don't believe power is your issue necessarily. Just before Christmas, I shot this 220 lb mulefoot boar at about 140 yards. It was impacted on the right side and ran. My hunting buddy said he hear the round impact the hog. Of course, it ran into heavy brush. So we went to the feeder where the hog was shot to find the blood trail. There was none. Strangely, there weren't any fresh hog track despite the ground be soft and bare. So we split up and search in the general direction it ran. I found the hog about 100 yards from where it was shot. By luck, it collapsed at the edge of the truck trail between thickets.

I was shooting a Marlin 1895 in .45-70 and using 325 gr. Leverevolution hollowpoint ammo. At that distance, the round would have been traveling at over 1630 fps.

Here is the hog. The point of impact is visible in this image, only at the time, there was no blood on the exterior of the hog except some at the mouth. Given that I had not shot the head, there was apparently lung damage, but we could not find the hole. We rolled him over and checked the other side for an exit wound. Nothing. Rolled him back over and finger prodded him until a finger found a divot that turned out to be the entry hole. The hole was located forward of the white spot that seen top center of the hog.

The would did not produce blood until after we loaded the hog on the cart and transported it wound side down and then some of the fur and bed had a bit of blood. The boar's belly, however, felt like a sow with milk. It had bled extensively internal. It was rather like the wound was self-sealing. So you won't get a blood trail and the animal won't bleed much if you don't hit a highly vascular area and if the blood can find it easier to flow internally instead of externally.

So that was why there was no blood trail despite using a large caliber with fine velocity. Why no tracks? There were all sorts of tracks under the feeder and several heading in the general direction the hog ran, but none looked to be fresh hog tracks. They reason this hog did not leave us any hog tracks because it was mulefooted (syndactyl). Sure enough, there were some bizarre little horse/mule-like prints under the feeder but we knew those were not from the hog because hogs are cloven hooved...except when they are mulefooted, something neither of us had ever seen before in real life.

Note that other hogs I have shot with this round have bleed profusely. Sometimes things just don't go as planned.

Turns out that the hog was one that we were familiar with for at least the previous 4-5 months and had been given the name "Gash Back." This hog had been seen on the game camera as far back as August and was missing a large chunk of flesh where his hump should have been (gunshot wound?), about a softball diameter area that indicated a loss of about an inch of flesh. The gash was still not fully healed.

And boy, this guy stunk.