I’ve noticed a definite pattern through all of this. Many of the hunters when they call feel like they’ve hit the deer well……even though very few are more than scratched up and only maybe half are actually hit well enough to recover. Our perceptions of things in the heat of the moment will lie to us. You will tend to see things the way you want to see it.
Anyways, enough with the psychoanalysis……BigEd called the first one right. It wasn’t quite the pie plate sized blood spots I was hoping to see but this deer was actually bleeding what I would consider decent for a few short stretches of the track. They blew a good bit of white hair off of it too at the hit site. It looked about like the hit site pic in this thread a page of two back. The buck went straight onto the neighbors into a huge clearcut that was grown back up in sedge waist to chest high.
Fortunately they had the neighbors numbers ready to go and we got permission to go within a matter of minutes. That went way smoother than I anticipated. Unfortunately though, we tracked the deer all the way across that property before calling it off at the 1500 yard mark as it crossed over into yet another property owner. That was disappointing as hell because I really had high hopes for this one. I suppose they just blew the belly hair off because the deer had all kinds of places it could have bedded up and never did.
After we called it off we were walking back to the truck when another call came in from the morning hunt. The hunter reported that a buck ran a doe across the powerline at about 75 yards and he had to make a quick shot. He felt confident about the shot but could only find what they think might be a speck of blood. The had searched for over an hour and couldn’t find anything.
This deer was shot at what looked to be a slightly “quartering to” angle in the front of the shoulder with a 30-06. Look close in the pic and you’ll see it. There was only a tiny entry hole and no exit. The deer didn’t go 75 yards and piled up in a little thicket with no blood trail. The hunters said they had walked circles around him within 20 yards and just didn’t see him. It took Otis about 4-5 minutes. More to come later. To be continued………
More to come later. To be continued………
