Which way did he go??which way did he go??

Jackalope said:

Every hunter all the way back to Krog and his big stick has at one time or another. It's not weapon specific. Sometime things don't die as planned. Sucks when it happens and we all try like hell not to let it happen, but sometimes there are forces out of our control. Doesn't make anyone any less of a hunter.

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Exactly...and if it hasn't happend there's a really good chance it will. We all make mistakes...

I hit a small buck last season from the ground in my ghillie suit. I accidentally shot with my 30 yard sight and hit high. Tucky and I found where he laid up, but he disappeared without a trace. I hope he lived or somebody else picked him up. I also hit grazed one low with the SG, but she lived.

3 i think..

I lost my first archery deer last year. It should have been a gimme. I still to this day don't know what happened. I had numerous deer under the tree all evening. I passed on several small bucks and a few does that still had little ones. I finally decided to shoot this doe. She was 22 yard slight quartering away. Centered the pin and drilled her. It looked like a great shot, but the arrow was not a complete passthrough. As she was running away through the field i could see the broahead sticking out her right side and the flethchings were sticking out of the left. It was a little unnerving but i was sure she would go down before the treeline 125 yards away. Nope! She hit the treeline at fullspeed. As played it back in my head, I just couldn't grasp what happened. I don't know if I caught shoulder on the opposite side or what. When I got down there was no blood only hair. I never found a single drop of blood in the fieid. I had to go call the neighbor to get permission to follow the deers direction of travel. He ended up meeting me at the house and even brought a bloodhound flashlight. We only found minimal blood inside the treeline. Never recovered the arrow. This was the evening before gun season. He said he had people hunting that area in the moring and didn't want we out there all night. He and I did spend a little over an hour on the property with no luck. It was an awful feeling. I wish I had a better understaning of what happened.

2

One the largest buck I have shot..

A nanny doe at the Alum Specialty hunt...

About 6 years ago I put a low pass through shot on a dandy 8 pointer. I knew when I hit him it was low. Basically it was right where the white on his belly started. He ran about 40 yards, stopped and just calmly walked away like nothing happened. After I got down I saw that he was bleeding all over the place. I waited about an hour and began slowly tracking. His blood was good and he bedded once. After I saw I bumped him I left and decided to come back later that night. I did somemore tracking around 10pm until I ran out of blood. The next morning I looked again, but nothing.

Fast forward to the first day of gun season about two weeks later. I'm in the same spot and a small group came through putting on a drive. I decided to stay put hoping a big boy would do what they sometimes do... double back through the drivers. After the group passed me and they got into the bottoms below me I heard a shot and then some screaming about shooting a big buck. I still stayed put just frustrated at the days event and how they screwed me all up. About an hour later they came back my way dragging the deer. He looked eerily familiar. I stopped them and asked if I could look at the deer. They kind of looked at me funny and agreed to let me. I told them how I'd hit one in the belly earlier in the season that looked just like him. They thought I was crazy until I found the entrance and exit wound exactly where I told them it would be. That tough sucker made it through a pass through shot only to be ended by a slug of a 17 year old kid on a drive.

Part of me was mad I didn't get another shot, but the other part of me was happy to have closure knowing that he didn't go to waste. I was afraid he may have died without me finding him.

I've lost 2 in roughly eleven or twelve years of bowhunting. One, I hit a limb and the arrow deflected perfectly right into the guts. Sounded like shooting a goose-down pillow. The other, I don't have a clue what happened. I thought I hit a little high, but not terribly-high. The arrow stuck into the opposite shoulder and didn't make an exit wound. There was virtually no bloodtrail whatsoever. I learned a lot of lessons from those two deer....

2 years ago i shouldered a real nice buck, then 3 days later in the exact same stand, shouldered another buck. Talk about disappointment..No worse feeling than that. Like everyone else said, it happens. And if it hasnt, it will. Just get back out there, learn from it and hunt on!

Knock on wood I have only ever had one deer I hit with an arrow that I didn't recover. It was my first deer I shot at with a bow back when I was about 13-14 I think.
A doe and her 2 fawn had come strolling along the creek and I was sitting on a fallen tree that was laying across the creek. They got to the base of the tree I was sitting on since it was also a low spot in the creek bank and both fawns jumped right into the middle of the creek and started playing around splashing all around. The doe was just standing on the creek bank watching them and didn't see me sitting about 30' away. She was facing me for what seemed like forever lol. I was young, dumb, and excited so I shot for the base of the neck trying to get the crease in the sternum and get the arrow into the chest cavity. Needless to say that was a mistake and one I have never repeated. The arrow hit just low of my mark and bounced off her sternum and stuck in the ground. She stood up on her back feet spun around and took off like a shot with the 2 fawns right on her heels. I found a little blood on the arrow and on the ground but the trail quickly dried up and I knew she would heal up and be fine.

I cuaght up to her again during gun season. The bullet did a better job and dropped her in her tracks with a head shot. She had a good scar across her chest from the 180gr snuffer but otherwise she was just fine. The scar started just at the top of the breast bone (Just below the point) and went down to her right armpit. Missed my mark by about an inch low.

I have a dog. His sole purpose in life is to eat, sleep, poop, and help recover deer. Don't get me wrong, I let him get out and run and play in the off season as well as shed hunt. We went after 5 deer last year and recovered 3. One of the ones we didn't recover was seen on the hoof a month later. The other we found all but maybe 4" of arrow and had minimal blood. 99% sure the hunter hit the shoulder. My point is, it happens. Don't like it, but it happens.

In regards to me, I have no comment. I am entering my fourth season and don't want to jinx myself. The reality is though, sooner or later it is going to happen.

2 deer.

A doe that was quartering away and alert. She dropped at the shot and my arrow cracked right into the shoulder. Let her go over night, then came back mid morning the next day and picked up the trail. Tracked for half a day until the blood was lost, and no signs of the deer were found.

The other was a decent buck I shot on public land that to this day is still a mystery. Blood was everywhere, I waited over an hour before picking up the trail, had my buddy come out to meet me & help, only to find some other guys also tracking a deer in the same area. Don't know if they jumped him or what, but we found where he had bedded down, then got up. Trailed it some more but the wound must've plugged up with fat or something because the blood trail was non-existant after the bedded spot. It rained that night, but I came back out the next day and walked for hours in a grid search, never found him after two days of searching.

Both times sucked.