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Though all deer hunters hope for a one-shot kill, sometimes things go wrong. In the heat of the moment, arrows get deflected, scopes get bumped and trees seem to appear out of nowhere. The result is often a hunter’s worst nightmare: A wounded and unfound animal.
In any lengthy hunting career, a poorly placed shot is bound to happen. When it happened to Dan Butler, he weighed his options carefully before searching for the big doe he hoped would eventually fill his freezer.
He delivered the news to his fellow hunters once he returned to deer camp.
“I hit her behind the shoulder and got good penetration,” he told us. “But I’m afraid the arrow hit a bit higher than I would have liked.”
Instead of tearing through the woods after shooting the doe, he did the right thing by immediately exiting the area. On a suspected bad shot, the best course of action is usually to give the deer a couple hours to either expire of move off.
After a meeting of the minds in camp, it was unanimously decided that we would let he deer sit overnight and hit the trail at first light the next morning. Because it was sufficiently cold outside, we reasoned that even if she died immediately, the meat would still be good in the morning.
Dan knew that the arrow did not pass through the deer. He blamed that partly on the fact that he was shooting a recurve bow. Though they are responsible for killing myriad big game animals around the world, recurves in general cannot hurl an arrow with the speed of modern compound bows. As a result, arrows flung from them are more likely to stay with the animal than if they were shot with the new, high speed machines.
Without the arrow, we had no way of knowing how hard she was hit, and without a pass-through shot, the doe didn’t have an exit hole from which to bleed.
Before leaving the area, Dan confirmed the doe was indeed hit after finding a few drops of blood where he watched her re-enter the woods.
At dawn, when there was just enough light to see without the aid of a flashlight, all three of us started searching the trail.
Our hopes that she might be lying dead just inside the edge of the woods were quickly dashed. After 100 yards of following widely scattered drops of blood, we realized the hit wasn’t likely as good as we had hoped.
As wounded deer are often prone to do, she hit a main trail and followed it. Splattered drops of blood every 30 yards or so revealed the direction she was headed. As a deer moves quickly or runs while dripping blood, the drop will splatter the direction it’s headed.
When a deer stops in one spot and either beds or just stands and bleeds, it’s a good sign that the animal is hit hard or fatally. If not pushed, most fatally hit deer will expire in the first bed they make.
But Dan’s deer never stopped to bleed or bed. After following her very sparse trail at least 500 yards through the woods, we ran out of blood.
Rather than give up, however, we returned to the spot where she was shot and devised a grid pattern to cover the area with our eyes. Though we thought we covered the trail with great care, we also were not willing to give up just because we ran out of blood trail.
Sometimes, deer veer off trails for no apparent reason. Their travel patterns are even more unpredictable and erratic if they have an arrow sticking out of them, as we believed Dan’s deer might.
Embedded arrows clink and drag on every bush a wounded deer passes, keeping them on their feet and spooked longer than if the arrow had passed all the way through.
Two more hours of grid walking turned up no additional blood, the deer or the arrow. It was almost noon at that point, and it was time for another decision.
After rethinking the shot, and our extensive search, we all concluded that the deer probably didn’t perish. If she did, she certainly didn’t do so anywhere near where she was shot. We accepted defeat and decided to leave.
Dan was beside himself for making a bad shot, and we all hoped she would survive. In the end, however, we all felt good that we made every effort to retrieve her.
“These things happen to the best hunters in the world on occasion,” I offered Dan as we walked back to camp empty handed.
“I know,” he responded,” but that doesn’t make it feel any better.”