Well, actually, me being the forever experimenting hind of handloader, I can't say that I've ever had a single deer load. I've played around with dozens of combinations, and bullet styles/weights.
I've pretty much quit looking for a better bullet than the Remington 158g SP for deer. I firmly believe that you need a combination of impact velocity, expansion, and penetration to reliably put deer down with the 357 magnum. Truthfully though, under the right circumstances, just about any 357 bullet from 125g up will kill a deer. It just might take an expert tracker to find him after the shot.
The first, and I think the most important is penetration. You can't kill'em if you can't put a hole in something vital. It's easy enough to do that with any of the heavier tougher jacketed or cast bullets, but it's even easier to just put a caliber sized hole in the vitals with those bullets, so that means a very tough, and usually long tracking job.
After solving the penetration problem, taking into account the definate possiblility of having to go through a facing shoulder, and maybe even the off shoulder too for a definate exit wound, I started working on "quicker" kills. You absolutely will not drop deer quickly with this caliber if the impact velocity is too low to upset the vitals with some athourity. HPs are great for this, but often fail horribly in the penetration department.
I've settled on The Remington 158g SPs because they pretty much give you everything you need on deer sized game. Even at higher velocities from rifles, they'll reliably bust both shoulders, and exit just as well as cast bullets. I shot one pretty good sized deer with this bullet in the facing shoulder, through the vitals, and it exited through the hind quarter, after breaking the bone. I don't imagine it'd do that every time naturally, but it did that time!
My current deer load is...
158g Rem. SPs
CCI 550 primers
17.5g of Lil' Gun
Starline cases
This load gives me 1370 fps from my 5.5"(cut down) Blackhawk, and 1880 fps from my 1894C. 1370 fps is great in the Blackhawk up to about 50-60 yards. I'll let you know how 1880 fps with this bullet performs on close shots from the 1894C in a few days. I was a little concerned about the higher impact velocity at first, but after testing it out(on deer) at around 75 yards, I firmly believe it'll work very well even with an impact velocity of around 1800+ fps.
If it does work as good as I think, this will likely be my deer load in both guns from now on, as I'm getting sorta burnt out on looking for anything better. Besides, there's only so much you can expect from this caliber on deer, and I'm reasonably sure that I've arived there by now! LOL!
