I picked up a 45-70 barrel on the classifieds here a couple months ago, loaded up a bunch of 300 grain Hornady's on top of IMR-3031 (sighted it in of course), and headed for the woods last Thursday. About three hours into the weekend's hunt, a group of three deer walked into the woods about 40 yards from my stand high up in the plantation pine forest. I picked out a nice small doe from the group (I prefer to let the productive mature does go to produce more fawns), grunted, and placed the cross-hairs as near the kill zone as allowed by the inter-tangled branches of the pine trees. I pulled the trigger, and with a bright orange flash (it was starting to get dark), the deer took off. I waited a bit and got down from my stand. I walked in the direction that the deer fled and bumped into her laying down. I observed a large blood pool and decided that I was going to let her go for a while to die in peace. About an hour later we tracked her down and took her home. The shot was just behind the diaphram but was enough to bring her down. I hate wounding deer; it is my greatest fear when hunting (except falling from a tree) so I wasn't all that pleased with the shot placement. The exit hole was substantial though (about an inch) so the Hornady did its job.
The moral of the story though, I was very impressed with how handi the Handi is! The 45-70 is a great hunting cartridge and a hoot to shoot. I bought it for hunting out of trees due to the compact size and weight, and handi it was in the trees of WI. The main gun season opens in late November so we'll again be making the trip north to meat in the freezer with a handi 45-70 Handi.
ETA: A side note...
After a miss at a close deer, my brother-in-law was questioning the zero of his scope. We keep all one gallon plastic jugs for occasions such as these, so it was time for some ballastic experimentation. I filled up six of them with pond water and placed them in a line, the first one had a peel-and-stick target placed on it. The goal was to capture the bullet. From 50 yards the bullet when right through center of the target (poor shot at the deer if you ask me), emptied the water from the first three jugs, but the bullet was deflected some and missed the remaining three jugs. I have video of this one and need to edit it and get it up on youtube. We took the remaining three jugs and emptied them the fun way. He shot the next one with his 270 WIN; the back blew out of it and water went everywhere as expected. I shot the next one with the 45-70 (300 gr Hornady @~1900 fps). The jug darned near dissappeared! The shot split it directly in half and layed it out flat; the water seemed like it was vaporized. I of course didn't take video of these shots so no further entertainment value.
This is one way to show young kids the power of a rifle and give them a very good reason to respect all rifles. Even a 22 LR will do good damage to a gallon jug.
