As the title implies, the loss of the doe I shot on Saturday has been tough for me to deal with. I killed my first deer with a bow in 2000 and since that kill, I have only lost two deer with a bow in close to 20 total kills. The first deer I lost was in 2001 and could be contributed more to a poor decision to track a single lung shot deer, than it could the shot itself. That buck was a P&Y 8 and has always haunted me as it would have been my first buck. Losing that doe on Saturday drug up some feelings I hoped I would never feel again. However I knew I would face that gut wrenching feeling sooner or later because as we all know, if you do this long enough, you will have to deal with losing a deer. I did not hunt at all Sunday as it just didn’t feel right to be back in the woods and honestly, I still don’t feel like being out there. There is simply no excuse for me to not kill a deer that gave me the shot she did, yet I somehow failed to finish things. After some serious evaluation of the shot, the track job, and the final results, I felt this was a valuable learning experience for me and hope it could serve as such to someone else. That being said, here is a look at how things went down Saturday evening and what transpired after the shot.
Below is a crude diagram of the shot angle she gave me from my blind at a distance of 20 yards. As you can see from the angle, the arrow should have caught offside lung even if the shot was a bit forward. The arrow was a complete pass through and buried in the ground at an angle that after further thought, indicated it actually passed through at a forward angle, not a backwards angle as it should have. When I first inspected the arrow, I did not give it a second thought. It wasn’t until later in the night that I thought about what the arrow should have told me.
If I was aiming at a baseball, I hit on the outside edge of the baseball at 9 o’clock. The yellow dot on the deer below shows where my arrow impacted. The doe is standing at a similar angle to the one I was presented with. I have played the shot over a thousand times in my head and to be honest, I’m not so sure I would have changed the impact. If anything, I would have moved it back 2”, but I did not feel it was far enough forward to miss vitals. Additionally, the arrow did not “CRACK” like it would have had I hit should and the sound of the impact was the familiar sound of one hitting the chest cavity. Everything happened in slow motion it seemed and I can still see those fletching disappearing in that yellow dot…
There was blood at the impact and brown hair that indicated the shot was in the chest. The blood was a brighter red than what I would have liked and it was sans air bubbles, but I still felt it was a good shot at the time. Roughly 25 minutes after the shot, I decided to stalk to the last place I saw here using the four wheeler path she had used as an escape route. The walk was quiet given the absence of leaves and I never jumped her. About 150 yards in to the track job, I begin to get worried and started to reevaluate everything. At the shot, she dropped and really threw her front shoulder back seemingly at the same time the arrow impacted her and it had me wondering what it could have done to the arrow as it passed through. I now knew I was not dealing with a heart shot deer, and was thinking it was a single lung hit. Seeing something white another 50 yards ahead, I pressed on only to find two large spots of blood where she had stopped and that the white, was a milk jug. (It was buried in the brush and my binos are junk.) At this point, it was 45 minutes after the shot and I was 200 yards from impact, so I backed out.
I gave her two hours before heading back out with my dad and the flashlights to track her. It was a slow process as the blood was very sparse after the two pools of blood I found earlier. Both pools resembled muscle blood more than anything else, so my gut was already starting to twist. As she bobbed and weaved through the nasty mess of briars and thicket, we were on hands and knees at times crawling after her searching for drops and specs of blood. After another 200 yards, we found a bed with a much smaller pool of blood, some spit, and some watery blood. The edge of the bright red blood was drying up, so I knew it had been a while since she was in that bed. My past tracking experience told me it was now best to keep her moving so she would continue to bleed and hope that I did enough damage for her to bleed out if we kept her moving.
It took us nearly two hours to travel close to a mile before we started to consider backing out until the morning. As we were discussing what to do, we jumped a single deer 50 yards ahead of last blood and it sounded like her. I know the snort of this doe as she has a much longer, chestier snort than most does I have heard. Not to mention I have heard it more than I can to say!!! I am nearly 100% positive it was her and by the time we turned to leave, she had put another 100-150 yards between us. My attempts to locate her on Sunday were futile at best. Total, we tracked her for 3 hours and a distance of 5,000+ feet according to Google Earth. I am fairly confident in saying she will survive our encounter only to bust me another day.
I have played the shot over and over in my head, and combined with the results, I have come to one conclusion. In my opinion, when she dropped and threw that shoulder back, it caused the arrow to exit forward of her offside shoulder, missing vitals and doing no more damage than making for some sore muscles. The shot was a bit forward and may have missed the front of her lungs an inch or two, but was not forward enough to impact the shoulder. The angle should have resulted in at least the backside of her lungs taking a hit, yet they obviously did not given the time we allowed her to expire and the distance she traveled. Not to mention the spit in her bed did not have any blood in it, indicating her lungs where fine. It seems like such a fluke for this to happen, but I honestly cannot come up with another explanation. Funny things happen in the whitetail woods and this is just one more reminder of that the old mantra of “what can go wrong, will go wrong” never rings as true as it does with bowhunting.
Below is a crude diagram of the shot angle she gave me from my blind at a distance of 20 yards. As you can see from the angle, the arrow should have caught offside lung even if the shot was a bit forward. The arrow was a complete pass through and buried in the ground at an angle that after further thought, indicated it actually passed through at a forward angle, not a backwards angle as it should have. When I first inspected the arrow, I did not give it a second thought. It wasn’t until later in the night that I thought about what the arrow should have told me.
If I was aiming at a baseball, I hit on the outside edge of the baseball at 9 o’clock. The yellow dot on the deer below shows where my arrow impacted. The doe is standing at a similar angle to the one I was presented with. I have played the shot over a thousand times in my head and to be honest, I’m not so sure I would have changed the impact. If anything, I would have moved it back 2”, but I did not feel it was far enough forward to miss vitals. Additionally, the arrow did not “CRACK” like it would have had I hit should and the sound of the impact was the familiar sound of one hitting the chest cavity. Everything happened in slow motion it seemed and I can still see those fletching disappearing in that yellow dot…
There was blood at the impact and brown hair that indicated the shot was in the chest. The blood was a brighter red than what I would have liked and it was sans air bubbles, but I still felt it was a good shot at the time. Roughly 25 minutes after the shot, I decided to stalk to the last place I saw here using the four wheeler path she had used as an escape route. The walk was quiet given the absence of leaves and I never jumped her. About 150 yards in to the track job, I begin to get worried and started to reevaluate everything. At the shot, she dropped and really threw her front shoulder back seemingly at the same time the arrow impacted her and it had me wondering what it could have done to the arrow as it passed through. I now knew I was not dealing with a heart shot deer, and was thinking it was a single lung hit. Seeing something white another 50 yards ahead, I pressed on only to find two large spots of blood where she had stopped and that the white, was a milk jug. (It was buried in the brush and my binos are junk.) At this point, it was 45 minutes after the shot and I was 200 yards from impact, so I backed out.
I gave her two hours before heading back out with my dad and the flashlights to track her. It was a slow process as the blood was very sparse after the two pools of blood I found earlier. Both pools resembled muscle blood more than anything else, so my gut was already starting to twist. As she bobbed and weaved through the nasty mess of briars and thicket, we were on hands and knees at times crawling after her searching for drops and specs of blood. After another 200 yards, we found a bed with a much smaller pool of blood, some spit, and some watery blood. The edge of the bright red blood was drying up, so I knew it had been a while since she was in that bed. My past tracking experience told me it was now best to keep her moving so she would continue to bleed and hope that I did enough damage for her to bleed out if we kept her moving.
It took us nearly two hours to travel close to a mile before we started to consider backing out until the morning. As we were discussing what to do, we jumped a single deer 50 yards ahead of last blood and it sounded like her. I know the snort of this doe as she has a much longer, chestier snort than most does I have heard. Not to mention I have heard it more than I can to say!!! I am nearly 100% positive it was her and by the time we turned to leave, she had put another 100-150 yards between us. My attempts to locate her on Sunday were futile at best. Total, we tracked her for 3 hours and a distance of 5,000+ feet according to Google Earth. I am fairly confident in saying she will survive our encounter only to bust me another day.
I have played the shot over and over in my head, and combined with the results, I have come to one conclusion. In my opinion, when she dropped and threw that shoulder back, it caused the arrow to exit forward of her offside shoulder, missing vitals and doing no more damage than making for some sore muscles. The shot was a bit forward and may have missed the front of her lungs an inch or two, but was not forward enough to impact the shoulder. The angle should have resulted in at least the backside of her lungs taking a hit, yet they obviously did not given the time we allowed her to expire and the distance she traveled. Not to mention the spit in her bed did not have any blood in it, indicating her lungs where fine. It seems like such a fluke for this to happen, but I honestly cannot come up with another explanation. Funny things happen in the whitetail woods and this is just one more reminder of that the old mantra of “what can go wrong, will go wrong” never rings as true as it does with bowhunting.
