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Old November 24, 2004, 01:43 PM   #23
Long Path
Senior Member
 
Join Date: May 31, 1999
Location: N. Texas
Posts: 5,899
Yes, I have. I looked for hours, with no blood spore (only know I hit it because I found the bullet in a mesquite tree with a bit of hair on it.). The shot was with a borrowed rifle at a deer that I could just see in deep brush. I will forever be ashamed of that shot.

Another deer I creased the hide of, ripping a furrow in the white belly hair. I'm sure it was hurting, but recovered. This was an iron-sighted rifle that I was hunting with, and my partner and I had belly-crawled to one side of a large pond and were each going to take a deer from the other side. We agreed on which deer to shoot (me left, him right), and that, because he had a scoped rifle and I an iron-sighted rifle, he would wait 'til I lined up my shot and would fire his shot upon hearing mine.

Well, he blew the entire plan. He saw two completely other deer line up, and decided to try to take two deer at once. He shot before I was ready, and I saw what I had thought was "his deer" running away. (Why shouldn't it? He didn't even shoot at it as planned.) Thinking it was wounded, I made a quick snapshot at the deer, hitting a little low and creasing the chest. I could see where I hit, and my partner later saw the deer again and reported a side-to-side red line running across it's underside. The big doe likely recovered-- but I felt bad. More importantly, I felt angry at my hunting partner, who had precipitated this, and had wounded the back deer! He was using 150g Nosler Ballistic Tips in his .30-06, and at 100 yds, his bullet completely opened up to leave a quarter-dollar-sized exit hole, so that it just basically slammed into the second deer like a hammer without penetrating. Who knows if that doe made it? We never found her, nor any blood spore from her.

If you hunt long enough in real fair-chase situations, the game will occasionally get away, even when hit. Heck, they'll get away even when hit well, sometimes. (I've seen a hog hit in the boiler room with a 165g '06 that we NEVER found after it made the brushy creekbottom.) That's why it's called "hunting" rather than "gathering." But we owe it to the game we hunt to do our best to prevent that from happening by making the best shots we reasonably can with what can reasonably be considered effective tools, and we owe it to them to follow up on those shots for as long as it takes to recover the meat of our game.

Track 'em down!
I have recovered two bucks that had to be searched long and hard for. The first I shot on the run, hitting too far back but benefitting from good bullet construction when the bullet continued through the lungs and created a mortal wound. The deer ran on into some brushy cover. I got my father and brother, and sent them to look for it at the spot that I had last seen it at, while I stood on the exact spot I had shot from to direct them to the spot to try to find spore. (Trust me: everything looks different when you get to the spot physically. Best technique is to that the hunter stand in the spot he shot from, and send his buddy to the spot where the game was last seen to him. If you can't do this because you're alone, mark your shooting position with something bright, and then mark the position of the animal when last seen, and the position of the animal when hit.) As the shot had entered the right ham and stopped against the sternum, there was ZERO blood, anywhere. Still, I knew the shot felt good, and kept looking. And looking. And looking. Finally I went back to the truck to get the shotgun to attempt to run it down, and got a holler from my dad-- my 9 year old brother had found it piled up in a brushpile, not 20 feet from where I had seen it last! Camouflage is amazing.

My third buck ran transversely to my right out of the field that I had just made a 300 yard shot on it in, jumped the fence just as neatly as you please, and ran into the brush. THICK brush. I looked and looked and found no blood. I got my father and hunting partner. We could find no blood. I thought about how the buck had reacted to the shot. Um... unconcerned, actually. He just ran out of the field. We looked for over an hour and a half, and hiked for well over a mile in a line through that brush, looking for that deer. Finally we returned to the fence. My host went back to the fence, and began walking it toward my firing position. Surprise! New tracks crossing the fence much closer to my firing postion than I had expected. The old buck had actually approached me as he cleared the field, exiting about 100 yds closer to me than I had expected. We shortly found him piled up about 80 yards from the fence. A nice 11pt with dulled tines from fighting, I would have been utterly crushed to have lost him. It would have been easy to have given up and decided that I must have missed him. (No blood, no reaction to the shot other than running...) But by making the extra effort to find him, I saved the meat and I still have that rack on a plaque. And it's a fact-- that closing morning of deer season, January of 1991, there wasn't a prouder 19 year old in all of N. Texas.
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