Two years ago I was hunting with my friend at his farm and we were hunting deer and bear (during PA deer season but bear overlapped the first week) out of his box blind, one side overlooked soybeans, the other side was corn. I was using my new 7mm wby mag and I shot both 160 partitions and 150 ballistic tips, the 150 BT's grouped better so I grabbed those for the hunt. To make a long story short, just before it got too dark to see, it was that dusky grainy part of the day, a nice bear is walking towards the box along the bean field and I shot it at around 120 yards and it went right down and 2 seconds later it got up and ran into the bean field. We searched that night and again the whole next day and never found that bear. We found blood, some mashed up bone but no bear.
To this day I run that shot through my head and here are the facts and my opinion of what happened:
The bear was walking towards me so my target was the chest/neck area.
I shot with the gun resting on the widow pane of the box blind, so steady rest.
I think I hit the shoulder/leg resulting in a non-lethal shot.
I posted this on another forum and most agreed that it was operator error but some pointed to the BT, saying it might be bullet failure.
I have been a little spooked by that so I go out with the partitions now but the BT's grouped really nice for factory ammo, so am I being unnecessarily wary or trying to convince myself that it wasn't my fault.
Tom