I messed up

On Wednesday afternoon I went out bow hunting. My stand is only about 70 yards away from the property line of the property where the potential world record typical deer was taken last week. I was out for about 15 minutes when a nice heavy racked 10 pointer came and walked to about 15 yard from my stand I grunted to make it stop and let the arrow fly.

But like I said I messed up, I put my 20 yard pin right on the deer and the deer was at 15 yards. Normally that wouldn’t have made much of a difference, because my bow shoots about three inches high at 15 yards with my 20 yard pin at a target that is at the same height, but I was 20 feet higher than the deer when I shot, so when I shot the deer I hit it just under the spine.

The deer ran about 20 yards and then started to walk so I started to grunt to see if I could get it to stop again so that I could get another arrow in him, but he didn’t stop. So I watched him walk off. And then I heard something right behind me so I looked back and there was a really nice 8 pointer. I must have called him in while trying to get the other one to stop. He walked right under me and then walked off.

I waited a half hour before I got out of my stand to fined the blood trail and see how hard he was bleeding. When I found the blood trail it was just as heavy as the last deer I shot and I shot that one through both lungs and the heart. So I was really hoping I had a good hit. I went back to my stand and called my dad and he came out to help track. By the time we started to fallow the blood trail it was two hours since I had shot it. We started to follow the blood trail slowly so that if he was bedded down we could hopefully sneak up on him if he was still alive.

The blood trail was really heavy for the first 200 yards and than started to slow. We trailed him for just under a mile when came to ware he came to a river. And we could not pick up on the trail any ware on the other side of the river. What we think happened was that he laid down in the river just long enough to stop the bleeding, and go on his way and find somewhere to lay down and most likely die.

Good Hunting,

Caleb