When the call came in, the hunter reported having arrowed a mature buck from 20 feet up and at the close range of only 5 to 8 yards. Once I got to the hit sight, I saw the distance was actually even worse. It was only 4 yards at best. To make matters even worse than that, the buck was facing directly towards the hunter when he shot.
In that configuration, there is absolutely no chance of double lunging the animal, and only an extremely, extremely low chance of hitting the heart. This is a shot that never should be taken with a bow. The hunter did not see the arrow hit the deer, but he reported a bright red blood-soaked arrow with short gray or white hairs on it. At the shot, the deer barely reacted and walked away 10 yards, but stood wobbling for 20 seconds, then walked another 15 yards away and laid itself down behind a tree in some brush. The deer was lying there, with no window for a second shot, for 45 minutes with its mouth wide open, panting. After 45 minutes, the hunter reported the deer had staggered to his feet and wobbled away out of sight, without offering another shot opportunity. The deer left a solid 2 inch wide strip of its bright red blood from a few yards past the hit site to the place it laid for 45 minutes. After it got up from the 45 minute bed, there was not a single drop of blood found by neither the hunter nor my dog the next day over the course of the whole track (see next page).
After hearing the hunter's account of the deer's behavior after the shot, I assumed he had hit back farther than he had aimed and gut-shot the deer. Gut shot deer typically react minimally to the bow shot and lay down quickly as this deer had done. When I got to the hit sight, I quickly discovered that the deer had actually been single lunged, not gut shot. There were 2 oak leaves in the 45 minute bed filled with coagulated blood, still showing the typical hundreds of bird shot sized bubbles often seen in blood gurgling out of a deer from a lung shot. From that point forward, there was not a drop of blood found.
In retrospect, what had likely happened was that the razor-sharp arrow cleanly slipped between the ribs and pierced one lung, without touching any bone. The deer barely knew anything had happened, other than a sudden shortness of breath and a sickening feeling. He instinctively walked over to cover and laid down to rest. The lung then collapsed and, therefore, stopped bleeding, as Mother Nature had planned. Mature bucks are masters of conserving energy. They rarely panic. That's how they get to be mature bucks. Once the bleeding stops and the deer has been lucky enough to not go into shock (as a result of not panicking and running off all crazed, and losing too much blood too fast), now all you have is a tired, anemic deer with one lung. No different than a person who just came out of surgery after having one of his two lungs removed.
When I started my dog, Eibe, on the 24 hour old track she had a bit of difficulty getting going. I am guessing that, with the mass of blood the first 30 yards, the area was flooded with scent and she had a hard time figuring out what the deer himself smelled like. We knew what direction the deer had walked out of the bed, but I let Eibe take 4 or 5 trial runs in several directions for 30 or 40 meters each until she finally locked in on the deer's individual scent. There was no blood to be seen, so she started poking her nose down into the fluffy oak leaves and checking hoof prints in the soft, underlying ground. Once locked onto the correct buck, we tracked bloodlessly for 1,000 meters through open forest and field, then up a steep hill into a briar and laurel thicket. The trail went about 100 meters into the thicket on the top of the hill, and then began to hook back. At that point, I said to the hunter that I believed we were about to find a dead deer or jump him, still alive.
Continued >