I’m home, and after 10 hours of driving through the night with two little girls, two dogs, my wife, and a whole lot of everything-but-venison in my truck, I have had a lot of time to think and re-check and replay and reevaluate and reminisce and repulse over the situation.
Here are some things I know:
1. I had a seriously great time hunting this property, and had multiple opportunities at healthy, heavy deer. I missed a shot completely, severing the cambium layer of one very unfortunate chestnut tree, and three days of low-impact hunting and lots of observing deer later, I hit a donkey-sized nanny doe with a freshly sharpened broadhead at 18 yards while she munched on berries.
2. I felt very confident making that shot. Even after missing in the same tree, I felt great about a big deer at 18 yards in my 11:00 window, calm and unobstructed. I capped myself at 20 yards for this property, and practiced 24 hours before shooting her out to 25 and 30. I was calm during the shot and managed to make my shot process work, probably due to shooting the nerves out the day before. I was seeing 2-10 deer at a time as well as turkeys and all kinds of other animals, almost every time I hunted, and I took the best shot I felt I had presented to me, but that amount of stealth-heavy animal activity is enough to juice up even a mild-blood-pressure man like myself every time.
3. Nothing is certain. That’s nature. She can mess with whomever she chooses and doesn’t care about your feelings.
4. We did jump a deer while tracking the first night. I thought it was a buck based on size, but it could have been her because it was about 30-40 yards off last blood. The landowner crept to where we saw its flag but there was no blood or hair on anything within another 30 yard radius. It definitely went to the anti-hunter’s side, whether it was her or not. He is explicitly not allowed to recover deer from that property.
5. I will be following up with the landowner about not only getting a dog on the trail if it’s still possible, but also just for sharing his little piece of deer heaven with me. The property was beautiful, the scouting was on-point, and I didn’t expect to get any sort of intel since it was a free-permission deal, but he put me right in the deer every single day, and was super helpful in allowing access to his limited time and family’s home turf. He even told me I could shoot his own target bucks, if they came to my trees.
6. Boy, did I have some learning experiences.
7. You all have been awesome on this thread. I have a lot of mental BS to deal with, wrestling between “I suck” and “shut up, it’s not hunting if it’s always a success” and “I can’t wait to get back in the tree” and “do I really need to lose another deer” and “shut up, go get one back for the home team”. I appreciate each and every one of your words of encouragement, experience, explicit honesty, and sentiment.
Here are some things I think:
1. I’m no longer convinced I got a second lung. Definitely one, not sure about the other. I believe we may not have given her enough time to expire. After reviewing the map’s tracker and blood coordinates, as well as the branch-off areas we searched, I think she bedded down about halfway through the trail after crossing a muddy creek-bottom and shedding my fletchings. There’s blood “stains” there, as if she shifted her weight around trying to get comfortable. This is also the spot where my wife and I found what we thought was “fresher” blood, but I can’t confirm that it wasn’t just too shady and dewey to dry up in some areas. There’s no blood or hair in the surrounding area, and the creek is undisturbed along parallel banks. All good tracks are perpendicular, and the trails are well-worn.
2. If she did bed halfway, we likely pushed her after waiting only 90 minutes. We probably soft-bumped her from that bed, she trickled onto some other stuff, found a better bed, and perhaps clotted up while we moved upwind before hard-bumping to the neighbor’s or the next county.
3. I think I could have probably pushed into some thicker stuff a little harder, but there was a lot at risk in that. There was only about half an acre of disgustingly thick, undisturbed by deer trails cover on the main property and permitted-neighbor’s property that we didn’t zig-zag according to OnX, including the open field. The only areas we didn’t hit were rut-hunting stand areas, which were 100’s of yards from the shot anyway and have little deer activity yet, or areas that would have interfered with the neighbor’s cattle business (which did receive binocular observation). We checked the spypoint WiFi cams and she has not showed up as of this post.
4. Single lung hits are tough to judge. I was relatively certain after shooting that it was 1 lung, but some of the blood spatter was misleading. If it was a double lung, or if she survived with an arrow in her chest, I feel awful for losing her and will probably never get over it completely.
