What happens when the trail goes cold? This year on a hunt I had an opportunity to shoot at a buck at 45 yards, so I took the shot. I took the shoot, because I had put in a lot of practice before hand, and I am very comfortable and confident shooting at this range. Last year I shot a nice buck at 56 yards and it was a perfect heart shot. So shooting at this range is no problem for me. “So what happen this time?” “What went wrong?”
I was hunting Black Tail deer in the thick timbers of California in the A Zone. I was walking on a game trail because in California we hunt in the summer, and all of the leaves around me were dry and made a lot of noise if stepped on. I took my usual course of action as I began my hunt. I would walk ten yards, stop, look, listen, and then repeat.
It was about a quarter mile into my hunt when I heard a subtle crackling noise down the hill. It is at this point when all hunters have to decide what they’re going to do. Should they wait to see what’s making that noise or keep moving forward? What could it be? Could it be a pesky squirrel, a bird, or is it that trophy buck you’ve been dreaming about? There is only one way to find out so I sat down and waited.
At this point in my hunt I didn’t have anywhere to hide so I sat with my back against a tree. As the sound got closer and louder it didn’t take long for me to realize that it wasn’t a squirrel. After about thirty minutes of waiting, it appeared. It was a huge 3×3 buck with four-inch eye guards. It was just out of reach and in the timbers. I couldn’t move at all without alarming the deer so I continued to patiently wait. This massive buck was coming directly toward me when out of nowhere he turned and started walking to the left and away from me. It was so thick where I was that I didn’t have many options nor did I have any good shooting lanes to shoot from. The Buck stopped behind a shrub and started scraping the backside of it. When it stopped, I had just enough time to range find it at forty-five yards. I knew that if he continued in the same direction he had been going I would be unable to take another shot if I didn’t take it now. There was an opening in the shrub that looked good enough to slip an arrow through so I pulled back my Elite Z28, took a breath, put my pin right behind the front shoulder and slowly pulled my release. SMACK!!! I drilled it. The Buck jumped up in the air, mule kicked both back legs then ran off. I saw that the hit was a little high but I was confident that it was a lethal shot. Now, more waiting began. I waited for about an hour then went to see the area of impact. I didn’t see anything, no blood, no arrow, nothing. Immediately all of my confidence came crashing down. When I didn’t see any blood my next thought was to go to the point where I saw the buck disappear into the brush. Again, I found nothing. There was not a single sign that I even hit this deer.
After walking up and down the steep ravine, through the brush and in poison oak, I still didn’t see any signs. After an hour or so of looking for this deer I finally saw four six-inch diameter pools of blood. The blood was thick and bright red. My first thought was that I shot the heart. I realized, however, that there was no way that was possible because the wound I saw was too high to be a heart shot. However, my find of blood helped me believe and hope that the buck was nearby. Two hours later I still had nothing. There wasn’t any blood to trail. In fact, the trail went cold. I didn’t know what else to do so I called it quits. I went home, ate some lunch, grabbed my hunting dog and went back out. After searching for several more hours I still came up empty. Even my dog wasn’t catching a scent.
The next day I thought I would go back one more time to see if maybe, given that it had been over 90 degrees outside, I would at the least smell something that would help me find him. I went back to the point of impact to see if I could find my arrow, believing that if I could find my arrow I would know a lot more. “Would there be blood on the arrow, meat, bubbles from lungs, or anything at all?” After just five minutes of searching, I found my arrow. It was between the impact zone and the last place I saw the deer run through the brush. Somehow I had missed it during my search. There it was, my arrow, soaked in blood. Just when I was about to give up, I had found hope again.
Unfortunately, after two days of looking, I still had no deer. The question I kept asking myself was, “Could this deer have survived my shot?” I spoke to several of my hunting friends about what had happened and showed them my arrow and pictures of the blood. And the answer I kept getting, based on these two pieces of evidence, was that the deer had to be dead somewhere. “So why couldn’t I find it?”
The reality of hunting is that, even with practice and experience, you don’t always make the best shot. Whether it is your nerves getting to you, buck fever, or in my case a branch that gets in the way, or you just make a bad shot, sometimes it happens. At the end of the day all you can do is practice, practice, practice, and then practice some more. As a hunter our goal, when getting ready to take a shot at a buck, should always be to take an ethical shot.
A few weeks after my hunt, I found the buck I shot at. It was across the street on someone else’s property, still ALIVE and doing well. You could barely see where the deer had been shot. After doing some online research to determine what it meant to see bright red blood after a shot like mine, I found that it is an indication of either a heart shot or a shot to an area with a lot of blood vessels such as the rump, or in my case, the brisket.
All of the practice in the world can’t prepare you for when your heart starts pumping out of your chest, and your body starts to shake. I always tell my wife when those things stop I’ll stop hunting. Some things are out of our control and some things aren’t. The one thing you can control is whether or not you take an ethical shot. Keep this in mind before you pull the trigger.
Happy hunting and may your trail never go cold.
Written by Kevin Ratliff
