There is NO "No mans land". If there were, what would fill the space?? Air???? I think not. That would be like a sucking chest wound and deflate the lung. Lungs stick to the chest walls. Any void is filled with fat, meat or something. It's possible to just miss the backbone I would assume and barely graze the lungs. Blood loss would be minimal because you didn't really poke a hole in them. Shooting above the liver as Justin did could indeed not get vitals, but rather fat and other connective tissue. The liver is not in the chest cavity so you don't hit anything if you hit above the liver. The liver doesn't go from top to bottom. Lungs do fill the chest cavity. One of the problems with my wife's illiness was fluid build up between the lungs and the chest walls. In a normal body the lungs fill this space and are losely stuck to the walls. Fluid in deflates the lungs. When people talk of fluid in the lungs it's usually between the lung and the chest walls causing the lung to not beable to fill or to deflate. In my wife's case the drew off the fluid and inserted a powder to stick the lung back to the walls so the fluid couldn't build up as fast. One thing I've surely learned in over 80 bowkills is that what we think we see is not always so. We teach it in bowhunter ed. classes but until you see the bizzare happenings it's tough to realize how off our visual perception can be. Until the deer is in hand we can NEVER say for sure what happened. I won't go into stories, but I got some beauties. So no, there is no void in a healthy animal. Yes a deer can not bleed and escape with a marginal hit. Marginal doesn't necessarily mean you missed the chest cavity. Dead center it and you're gold. Give it a glancing blow and strange things are almost guaranteed.