An Exciting Start
An Exciting Start
It began as just another day in the Georgia archery season.
A cold front was moving in and the air was finally beginning to chill down, which was why I'd made the trip from my Florida home to my hunt camp in mid-Georgia. I'd tried hunting the early season a couple weeks earlier and had found that the deer there were still mostly in a nocturnal summer pattern. I was back in hopes that the cool weather would get them moving.
The front hadn't fully moved in yet, and the temperature was a mild 63 degrees when I arose to start my morning routine. An hour later, I was settled in my stand.
Previous Success
The stand was a tripod, and it had been moved to that location following my success at the same place the year before, when I took my made-to-order buck using a pop-up ground blind. The tripod was in just about the same place my blind had been, overlooking a small food plot.
Whoops!
As I settled in on the stand, I clumsily bumped my quiver, which I'd removed from my crossbow and set aside. Naturally, as it fell to the ground it missed no opportunity to bounce and clunk off of each crosspiece on the deer stand. I already had one Rage-tipped arrow in the crossbow, so I just gritted my teeth, hoped the noise wouldn't spook any nearby critters, and let the quiver stay where it was. If this turned out to be a normal morning hunt, I wouldn't even need one arrow anyhow.
Incidentally, the arrow on my string was the same one that had taken my first-ever archery deer more than three years earlier.
Action!
I'd been in the stand for about an hour and a half when I had a fleeting chance at a coyote and flung an arrow at it. The vagrant vermin handily jumped the string and left the scene unharmed, and I was left in the stand without ammo - so I climbed down and retrieved the quiver I'd dropped earlier. The arrow now on my string was a virgin.
The Deer Cometh
About 40 minutes after I'd tried to nail the coyote, a deer - and then another - stepped into the plot from the right. One was larger than the other, and was clearly a mature doe - which made her a perfect candidate to come home with me.
The doe was alert and although I managed to quickly confirm the range to her (35 yards) with my range finder, I was soon frozen in place while she stared up at the stand, trying to figure out what was wrong with this picture. My camo face paint may have helped prevent her from spooking immediately, but she was still pretty interested in me.
To see what I could get away with, I sloooooowly shifted the crossbow on the stand's rail and slid into position behind it, and found the deer in the scope. So far, so good.
The deer was fully alert, but not twitchy; that is, she was intent on the stand but didn't appear as if she might bolt unpredictably. She faced me, almost head-on but quartering just a touch, and I could see some of her left side.
Choosing the Shot
I quickly coached myself into finding the correct elevation using the scope's aiming points; I split the difference between the 30- and 40-yard marks. Knowing that shot placement is critical, I did as I always try to do and aimed at the vitals inside the deer. The center of the three-dimensional heart/lung area is where I wanted to put my arrow, and I aimed just to my right of the deer's centerline. The crossbow arrow, as aimed, should have easily penetrated ribs just inboard of the left shoulder, finding plenty of good stuff inside to decommission.
That was the plan, anyway.
Through it all, my heart hammered and my adrenaline surged... I was working methodically and carefully, but I was still pretty jazzed up.
Thunk!
With a squeeze of the trigger, I let the arrow fly. It got there quickly, but the deer was faster. I could tell that she had "jumped the string" and moved before the arrow arrived... the question was, how much had she moved? It had looked like a pretty good shot, but it was not easy to tell.
The deer wheeled and ran back into the woods in the direction from which she'd come. I heard her crashing in the brush and told myself to calm the heck down, that I had seen the arrow hit her front end and that's where the vitals are located. I got out a compass and busied myself determining the direction of the most recent crash I'd heard. I re-cocked my crossbow and placed another arrow on the string as I sat there, forcing myself to wait.
The time at the shot was 9:13.
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Beginning the Trail
Finally, I climbed down with all my gear and gathered the things I thought I would need for the task: handheld GPS unit, paper towels for marking blood as I found it, crossbow and arrows, and compass. I put my camera around my neck, too, so I could document what I found.
A Hairy Start
I found the place in the small field where the deer had been when I'd shot. The ground was scuffed by her hooves and a large tuft of hair was evident, but I saw no blood.
I eyeballed the semi-bare clay and soon found her tracks leading towards the thick brush, then another gob of hair lying at the edge of the field. One tiny opening in the thorny wild hawthorns was her obvious route, so I dropped to hands and knees and crawled through, ready to begin the blood-trailing.
My Arrow
Just inside the woods, several feet past the hawthorn hole, lay my arrow. It appeared to be straight and undamaged - and was pointing in the direction the deer had gone. It was thinly covered in blood and other stuff, indicating that it had passed entirely through the deer.
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"Gut Juice" and More
Nearby, on the blades of some small sawgrass, were some splatters of "gut juice," a brownish-gray substance that indicates the unhappy condition of having hit an animal in the guts.
That was not welcome news.
Things Start Looking Up
Shortly thereafter, though, I began finding blood instead, and was encouraged. I slowly followed the blood sign, often scanning the woods ahead for the deer. I tore off small pieces of paper towel and used them to mark the trail as I went.
After just a short ways, the blood became much more sparse and difficult to find. The trail showed that the deer had gone steadily downhill, which encouraged me. I moved slowly and methodically, searching for for the next sign and marking the trail as I slowly progressed.
Sometimes, scuffs in the leafy forest floor showed the way when I could find no blood.
As you can imagine, I prayed often during this.
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The Trail Grows Cold
Deer!
I had been tracking for about 50 minutes and had covered about 100 yards when I spotted movement ahead. It was a deer! "Oh, s--t," thought I, thinking that my deer was up and about. Instead, it turned out to be two does with two fawns, all perfectly healthy, which found me quite interesting and came closer to investigate before slowly moving on.
Going Downhill
The natural tendency for a wounded animal is to walk downhill, because it's a lot easier than going up.
The trail had so far led me from a ridge down into a hardwood bottom, or shallow valley. Along the lowest part of the bottom was a deep ditch. More than once, I walked to that ditch and looked down into it, hoping to find my deer. I walked ahead of the blood trail several times, scanning the forest floor for my deer, then walked back along the ditch, looking down into it. But I couldn't find any sign of my deer.
At one point, the blood trail turned left and started heading up the steep slope - and that bothered me. I wanted the deer to be weakening to the point where it couldn't climb a hill, but that didn't appear to have been the case. All I could do was track and look ahead, and hope for the best.
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Dead End
I finally found some blood on a fallen pine tree, and could find no more. I scoured the area nearby on hands and knees, I walked ahead to look for sign, I sat and prayed and tried to figure out if there was anything else I could do. I had tracked the deer for 168 yards (I measured the trail later) and found myself unable to do more. I finally decided that I had to go back to camp, and I started heading that way at 11:45.
Regroup and Recharge
Back at camp, I had what I hoped would prove to be a secret weapon: a small spray bottle containing hydrogen peroxide - the same stuff used as a first aid disinfectant. The idea was that it would make blood foam, to make it easier to find or identify. I had been moving that little bottle from camp to camp for more than three years and hadn't needed it until then. It was time to find out whether it was worth anything.
Back at camp, I borrowed an ATV from a friend (my Polaris Ranger was dead at the time), quickly chomped a peanut bar and guzzled a soda, packed a small cooler with more bars and beverages, and headed back out.
Determination
I was prepared to keep searching until dark if I had to; only then would I concede defeat.
I got back to the blood trail's "dead end" and began searching again at 12:45 or so. After searching for a while, I finally found more sign and began finding the deer's trail once again.
Slow, Foamy Progress
While the hydrogen peroxide doesn't produce a very dramatic effect (you can't spritz it over an area and easily spot the blood foaming), I found it extremely valuable for identifying tiny specks of stuff as blood (or other bodily fluid) as opposed to naturally-occurring specks.
And when I say specks, by golly I mean specks. Some of the spots were a little larger, but most of them were barely the size of pin heads - and many were only about the size of a pin point. If applying a small amount of hydrogen peroxide made it foam, I knew I had found some blood or other bodily substance. That confidence would have been impossible to achieve without the confirmation provided by the hydrogen peroxide, because these were very tiny specks that were few and far between, and they didn't always look nice and red.
Use With Care
One must be careful with this stuff, because once hydrogen peroxide reacts with blood, the blood is gone - therefore you must mark every spot as you go, because you can't re-find blood spots that aren't there anymore. And by the same token, if you spray down an area and miss seeing any blood foam, you may have just destroyed some valuable tracking evidence.
Trail's End
I spent the next hour and a half mostly on my knees, tracking the deer for another 80 yards. The blood trail had turned back down the hill and led me to - and along - a trail that roughly ran parallel with the ditch. By 2:00 I had found all the blood that I could manage to turn up, even on hands and knees using the hydrogen peroxide.
At least I knew that the deer had walked down that old trail. It seemed natural to me that it would have finally ended up dead in the ditch, but every time I had checked the ditch I had failed to find the deer; my forays forward and then back along the ditch had turned up nothing.
I was beginning to seriously lose hope.
More of This Article
I went and fetched the ATV and had some water, then just walked slowly down the old trail, scanning the woods on both sides for brown or white bits of a dead deer. I walked a long ways down the trail, turning up nothing but refusing to give up.
Finally it was time to turn around and head back, following the ditch and looking down into it. I had come a good ways when I rounded a bend, looked forward in the ditch, and spotted my deer lying there.
Jubilation
"Praise the Lord!" were the first words to escape my lips upon viewing that most exquisitely beautiful sight. Words do not have the power to convey the relief, the joy, the satisfaction, the realization of my labors, which I felt at that time. A great weight lifted off of me, and life became beautiful once again.
The time was 2:53. An hour had passed since I'd found the last blood - and the deer lay 175 yards beyond that last bit of blood. Five hours and forty minutes had elapsed since I'd loosed the arrow in her direction.
I said sincere thanks to God and hustled off to get the ATV. The weather was fairly cool, but I needed to deal with shucking her out ASAP - which I did.
Grim Reality
As I went about my work - grunted and dragged the deer out of the ditch that was deeper than I am tall, muscled it onto the ATV and strapped it down, took it back to camp and went about the messy work of skinning and quartering it - I did a lot of smiling. But behind and through it all ran a thread of grim reality: this day had very nearly come to a very different conclusion.
The arrow had hit the deer behind its right shoulder - which, as you may recall, is on the opposite side of its body from where I was aiming. Although poorly placed by me, the Rage broadhead did its job well, and took out the rear of the right lung before punching out through the gut.
It was inches away from being just a gut shot, and that just isn't acceptable.
An Accurate (but Poor) Shot
To be clear: my arrow had flown accurately, but the deer had been alert and had reacted instantly to the sound of my crossbow when I'd fired the arrow - thus she had been able to move her vitals almost entirely out of the way before my arrow even got there. I shouldn't have taken a shot with any kind of bow at a fully-alert deer - especially at the longish range of 35 yards.
My tale had reached a happy ending, for sure. The deer was recovered, its meat was fine, and I can still say that I have never lost a deer that I hit. But overall, the story is a sad one, and I hope I won't forget the lessons that it taught me.
- Russ Chastain
More of This Article
It began as just another day in the Georgia archery season.
A cold front was moving in and the air was finally beginning to chill down, which was why I'd made the trip from my Florida home to my hunt camp in mid-Georgia. I'd tried hunting the early season a couple weeks earlier and had found that the deer there were still mostly in a nocturnal summer pattern. I was back in hopes that the cool weather would get them moving.
The front hadn't fully moved in yet, and the temperature was a mild 63 degrees when I arose to start my morning routine. An hour later, I was settled in my stand.
Previous Success
The stand was a tripod, and it had been moved to that location following my success at the same place the year before, when I took my made-to-order buck using a pop-up ground blind. The tripod was in just about the same place my blind had been, overlooking a small food plot.
Whoops!
As I settled in on the stand, I clumsily bumped my quiver, which I'd removed from my crossbow and set aside. Naturally, as it fell to the ground it missed no opportunity to bounce and clunk off of each crosspiece on the deer stand. I already had one Rage-tipped arrow in the crossbow, so I just gritted my teeth, hoped the noise wouldn't spook any nearby critters, and let the quiver stay where it was. If this turned out to be a normal morning hunt, I wouldn't even need one arrow anyhow.
Incidentally, the arrow on my string was the same one that had taken my first-ever archery deer more than three years earlier.
Action!
I'd been in the stand for about an hour and a half when I had a fleeting chance at a coyote and flung an arrow at it. The vagrant vermin handily jumped the string and left the scene unharmed, and I was left in the stand without ammo - so I climbed down and retrieved the quiver I'd dropped earlier. The arrow now on my string was a virgin.
The Deer Cometh
About 40 minutes after I'd tried to nail the coyote, a deer - and then another - stepped into the plot from the right. One was larger than the other, and was clearly a mature doe - which made her a perfect candidate to come home with me.
The doe was alert and although I managed to quickly confirm the range to her (35 yards) with my range finder, I was soon frozen in place while she stared up at the stand, trying to figure out what was wrong with this picture. My camo face paint may have helped prevent her from spooking immediately, but she was still pretty interested in me.
To see what I could get away with, I sloooooowly shifted the crossbow on the stand's rail and slid into position behind it, and found the deer in the scope. So far, so good.
The deer was fully alert, but not twitchy; that is, she was intent on the stand but didn't appear as if she might bolt unpredictably. She faced me, almost head-on but quartering just a touch, and I could see some of her left side.
Choosing the Shot
I quickly coached myself into finding the correct elevation using the scope's aiming points; I split the difference between the 30- and 40-yard marks. Knowing that shot placement is critical, I did as I always try to do and aimed at the vitals inside the deer. The center of the three-dimensional heart/lung area is where I wanted to put my arrow, and I aimed just to my right of the deer's centerline. The crossbow arrow, as aimed, should have easily penetrated ribs just inboard of the left shoulder, finding plenty of good stuff inside to decommission.
That was the plan, anyway.
Through it all, my heart hammered and my adrenaline surged... I was working methodically and carefully, but I was still pretty jazzed up.
Thunk!
With a squeeze of the trigger, I let the arrow fly. It got there quickly, but the deer was faster. I could tell that she had "jumped the string" and moved before the arrow arrived... the question was, how much had she moved? It had looked like a pretty good shot, but it was not easy to tell.
The deer wheeled and ran back into the woods in the direction from which she'd come. I heard her crashing in the brush and told myself to calm the heck down, that I had seen the arrow hit her front end and that's where the vitals are located. I got out a compass and busied myself determining the direction of the most recent crash I'd heard. I re-cocked my crossbow and placed another arrow on the string as I sat there, forcing myself to wait.
The time at the shot was 9:13.
More of This Article
- 1: An Exciting Start
- 2: Beginning the Trail
- 3: "Gut Juice" and More
- 4: The Trail Grows Cold
- 5: Hydrogen Peroxide for Blood Trailing
- 6: Beyond the End of the Trail
Beginning the Trail
Finally, I climbed down with all my gear and gathered the things I thought I would need for the task: handheld GPS unit, paper towels for marking blood as I found it, crossbow and arrows, and compass. I put my camera around my neck, too, so I could document what I found.
A Hairy Start
I found the place in the small field where the deer had been when I'd shot. The ground was scuffed by her hooves and a large tuft of hair was evident, but I saw no blood.
I eyeballed the semi-bare clay and soon found her tracks leading towards the thick brush, then another gob of hair lying at the edge of the field. One tiny opening in the thorny wild hawthorns was her obvious route, so I dropped to hands and knees and crawled through, ready to begin the blood-trailing.
My Arrow
Just inside the woods, several feet past the hawthorn hole, lay my arrow. It appeared to be straight and undamaged - and was pointing in the direction the deer had gone. It was thinly covered in blood and other stuff, indicating that it had passed entirely through the deer.
More of This Article
- 1: An Exciting Start
- 2: Beginning the Trail
- 3: "Gut Juice" and More
- 4: The Trail Grows Cold
- 5: Hydrogen Peroxide for Blood Trailing
- 6: Beyond the End of the Trail
"Gut Juice" and More
Nearby, on the blades of some small sawgrass, were some splatters of "gut juice," a brownish-gray substance that indicates the unhappy condition of having hit an animal in the guts.
That was not welcome news.
Things Start Looking Up
Shortly thereafter, though, I began finding blood instead, and was encouraged. I slowly followed the blood sign, often scanning the woods ahead for the deer. I tore off small pieces of paper towel and used them to mark the trail as I went.
After just a short ways, the blood became much more sparse and difficult to find. The trail showed that the deer had gone steadily downhill, which encouraged me. I moved slowly and methodically, searching for for the next sign and marking the trail as I slowly progressed.
Sometimes, scuffs in the leafy forest floor showed the way when I could find no blood.
As you can imagine, I prayed often during this.
More of This Article
- 1: An Exciting Start
- 2: Beginning the Trail
- 3: "Gut Juice" and More
- 4: The Trail Grows Cold
- 5: Hydrogen Peroxide for Blood Trailing
- 6: Beyond the End of the Trail
The Trail Grows Cold
Deer!
I had been tracking for about 50 minutes and had covered about 100 yards when I spotted movement ahead. It was a deer! "Oh, s--t," thought I, thinking that my deer was up and about. Instead, it turned out to be two does with two fawns, all perfectly healthy, which found me quite interesting and came closer to investigate before slowly moving on.
Going Downhill
The natural tendency for a wounded animal is to walk downhill, because it's a lot easier than going up.
The trail had so far led me from a ridge down into a hardwood bottom, or shallow valley. Along the lowest part of the bottom was a deep ditch. More than once, I walked to that ditch and looked down into it, hoping to find my deer. I walked ahead of the blood trail several times, scanning the forest floor for my deer, then walked back along the ditch, looking down into it. But I couldn't find any sign of my deer.
At one point, the blood trail turned left and started heading up the steep slope - and that bothered me. I wanted the deer to be weakening to the point where it couldn't climb a hill, but that didn't appear to have been the case. All I could do was track and look ahead, and hope for the best.
More of This Article
- 1: An Exciting Start
- 2: Beginning the Trail
- 3: "Gut Juice" and More
- 4: The Trail Grows Cold
- 5: Hydrogen Peroxide for Blood Trailing
- 6: Beyond the End of the Trail
Dead End
I finally found some blood on a fallen pine tree, and could find no more. I scoured the area nearby on hands and knees, I walked ahead to look for sign, I sat and prayed and tried to figure out if there was anything else I could do. I had tracked the deer for 168 yards (I measured the trail later) and found myself unable to do more. I finally decided that I had to go back to camp, and I started heading that way at 11:45.
Regroup and Recharge
Back at camp, I had what I hoped would prove to be a secret weapon: a small spray bottle containing hydrogen peroxide - the same stuff used as a first aid disinfectant. The idea was that it would make blood foam, to make it easier to find or identify. I had been moving that little bottle from camp to camp for more than three years and hadn't needed it until then. It was time to find out whether it was worth anything.
Back at camp, I borrowed an ATV from a friend (my Polaris Ranger was dead at the time), quickly chomped a peanut bar and guzzled a soda, packed a small cooler with more bars and beverages, and headed back out.
Determination
I was prepared to keep searching until dark if I had to; only then would I concede defeat.
I got back to the blood trail's "dead end" and began searching again at 12:45 or so. After searching for a while, I finally found more sign and began finding the deer's trail once again.
Slow, Foamy Progress
While the hydrogen peroxide doesn't produce a very dramatic effect (you can't spritz it over an area and easily spot the blood foaming), I found it extremely valuable for identifying tiny specks of stuff as blood (or other bodily fluid) as opposed to naturally-occurring specks.
And when I say specks, by golly I mean specks. Some of the spots were a little larger, but most of them were barely the size of pin heads - and many were only about the size of a pin point. If applying a small amount of hydrogen peroxide made it foam, I knew I had found some blood or other bodily substance. That confidence would have been impossible to achieve without the confirmation provided by the hydrogen peroxide, because these were very tiny specks that were few and far between, and they didn't always look nice and red.
Use With Care
One must be careful with this stuff, because once hydrogen peroxide reacts with blood, the blood is gone - therefore you must mark every spot as you go, because you can't re-find blood spots that aren't there anymore. And by the same token, if you spray down an area and miss seeing any blood foam, you may have just destroyed some valuable tracking evidence.
Trail's End
I spent the next hour and a half mostly on my knees, tracking the deer for another 80 yards. The blood trail had turned back down the hill and led me to - and along - a trail that roughly ran parallel with the ditch. By 2:00 I had found all the blood that I could manage to turn up, even on hands and knees using the hydrogen peroxide.
At least I knew that the deer had walked down that old trail. It seemed natural to me that it would have finally ended up dead in the ditch, but every time I had checked the ditch I had failed to find the deer; my forays forward and then back along the ditch had turned up nothing.
I was beginning to seriously lose hope.
More of This Article
- 1: An Exciting Start
- 2: Beginning the Trail
- 3: "Gut Juice" and More
- 4: The Trail Grows Cold
- 5: Hydrogen Peroxide for Blood Trailing
- 6: Beyond the End of the Trail
I went and fetched the ATV and had some water, then just walked slowly down the old trail, scanning the woods on both sides for brown or white bits of a dead deer. I walked a long ways down the trail, turning up nothing but refusing to give up.
Finally it was time to turn around and head back, following the ditch and looking down into it. I had come a good ways when I rounded a bend, looked forward in the ditch, and spotted my deer lying there.
Jubilation
"Praise the Lord!" were the first words to escape my lips upon viewing that most exquisitely beautiful sight. Words do not have the power to convey the relief, the joy, the satisfaction, the realization of my labors, which I felt at that time. A great weight lifted off of me, and life became beautiful once again.
The time was 2:53. An hour had passed since I'd found the last blood - and the deer lay 175 yards beyond that last bit of blood. Five hours and forty minutes had elapsed since I'd loosed the arrow in her direction.
I said sincere thanks to God and hustled off to get the ATV. The weather was fairly cool, but I needed to deal with shucking her out ASAP - which I did.
Grim Reality
As I went about my work - grunted and dragged the deer out of the ditch that was deeper than I am tall, muscled it onto the ATV and strapped it down, took it back to camp and went about the messy work of skinning and quartering it - I did a lot of smiling. But behind and through it all ran a thread of grim reality: this day had very nearly come to a very different conclusion.
The arrow had hit the deer behind its right shoulder - which, as you may recall, is on the opposite side of its body from where I was aiming. Although poorly placed by me, the Rage broadhead did its job well, and took out the rear of the right lung before punching out through the gut.
It was inches away from being just a gut shot, and that just isn't acceptable.
An Accurate (but Poor) Shot
To be clear: my arrow had flown accurately, but the deer had been alert and had reacted instantly to the sound of my crossbow when I'd fired the arrow - thus she had been able to move her vitals almost entirely out of the way before my arrow even got there. I shouldn't have taken a shot with any kind of bow at a fully-alert deer - especially at the longish range of 35 yards.
My tale had reached a happy ending, for sure. The deer was recovered, its meat was fine, and I can still say that I have never lost a deer that I hit. But overall, the story is a sad one, and I hope I won't forget the lessons that it taught me.
- Never - as in, not ever - shoot an arrow at a deer that's on high alert.
- Always mark the trail as you go. Finding blood one time can be challenging; finding it twice can be impossible, especially if it's been sprayed with hydrogen peroxide. I tear off small hunks of paper towel to leave at each spot.
- Remember that rules always have exceptions. "Critically hit deer won't walk uphill" is clearly false - and it's not the only deer myth out there. Don't let fireside lore BS kill your hope.
- Be willing to look farther ahead, once a deer's direction of travel has been determined. If I had walked farther along the ditch when I'd first began looking into it, I could have found her hours earlier. I had been concerned about wasting time by randomly looking instead of trying to find her exact trail, which ironically probably cost me time.
- Never hunt very far away from a pump sprayer containing hydrogen peroxide. Using it helped me prove that the deer had gone downhill after the first dead end, significantly narrowing my search area. But again, mark the trail as you go because hydrogen peroxide destroys blood.
- Heed Churchill's advice: Never, never, never, never give up.
- Russ Chastain
More of This Article
- 1: An Exciting Start
- 2: Beginning the Trail
- 3: "Gut Juice" and More
- 4: The Trail Grows Cold
- 5: Hydrogen Peroxide for Blood Trailing
- 6: Beyond the End of the Trail
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