A Lesson We Can All Learn From: The Perfect Shot That Wasn't

[RedCloud]

Great write up Greg. Had you not found her and posted the pics of entrance and exit I wouldn't have thought in a million years that it was possible. Thanks for sharing this with all of us.

 

[finelyshedded]

Finally had time to read your write up! AWESOME data analysis and write up Flute!!!

Great points made and I agree that you circling around and coming down the prop line to bump her back was a great idea! I also wonder as well if the carbon arrows might flex too much if the point of impact is less than perfect.

Here's my thought on a possibility as to how the exit hole could also have been so high or off kilter. Could she have ducked and spun enough before the arrow reaching her to have completely change the arrows pathway once it made contact? Plus add the fact that it centerpunched a rib bone on top of it. Just a though. Did you notice anything after slowing the video down if in fact she did jump the string on you?

Regardless, you did an excellent job from start to finish in the recovery of this animal! :smiley_clap:

 

[Fullbore]

As the others have said. Great post and topic for a thread. We have all had similar experiences in our hunting past. Thanks for sharing and congrats TOO you on an awesome bow season!

 

[Dustinb80]

Glad you found her. Great write up.

 

[Buckmaster]

Ron had a buck at camp a few weeks ago on a broadside shot. The input hole hit the rear portion of front shoulder paddle. It proceeded to skip back into the rib cage area and exit thru the guts and liver on the opposite side. We waited 3.5 hours after the shot only to jump that buck from his bed thus we backed out until morning and found him 200 yards from where we had jumped him. After the gutting job was done we did the autopsy. The arrow made about a 6"-7" jump in between input and exit holes. One lung, liver, and guts. We're always learning.

 

[giles]

Are all these "new fast" arrows hurting us? Do we need to heavy them up and sacrifice speed?

 

[cotty16]

Amazing what we can learn from this type of thing. Great recap!

 

[Riverdude]

Great read and good information to learn from. My first doe this year I shot quartering away so I aimed back a little, the arrow went through the vitals and the exist blew out the front shoulder. Using Rage Mechanicals for the first time and I am sold on them. ( Was using Thunderheads 85 grain ). The BB I took was broad side and I could not believe the exit hole.



Great job TOO stay with it and recover your harvest.

 

[Big_Holla]

Great post. It's hard to tell but is there a chance she started ducking down and away at the time of hit? I've watched it on a full view a few times and that's the only other thing I can think of to help cause such a deflection?

 

[finelyshedded]

Great post. It's hard to tell but is there a chance she started ducking down and away at the time of hit? I've watched it on a full view a few times and that's the only other thing I can think of to help cause such a deflection?

That's exactly what I think that might have happened. Things happen so fast that unless the hunter had the shot on tape you might not ever know what happened. In this particular case Greg does have video of the shot which should allow for a better look. I hope he can slow it down and see if in fact this is or is not the case.

 

[Fluteman]

I played the video back frame by frame, and that deer didn't move until the arrow was through her. It was a delayed reaction big time. None of the deer had any idea I was around and we're completely at ease.

 

[Big_Holla]

Interesting. The near side, did you hit a rib on the way in? Man this is something for a forensic scientist to look at LOL!

 

[Milo]

I played the video back frame by frame, and that deer didn't move until the arrow was through her. It was a delayed reaction big time. None of the deer had any idea I was around and we're completely at ease.

Is there any way to slow it down enough to see the tracer nock moving on deflection?

 

[Fluteman]

Is there any way to slow it down enough to see the tracer nock moving on deflection?

No. I don't know if it's because of the vibration and movement after the shot, or a combination of things, but you can't see the arrow or the lighted nock at impact.

Interesting. The near side, did you hit a rib on the way in? Man this is something for a forensic scientist to look at LOL!

Yes, it dead centered a rib. I believe the bottom half of the rib shoved into the chest cavity on impact. And sprung up, changing the arrow's path.

 

[arjay]

Great write up and some great info! Thanks

 

[KYhunter]

Had a similar thing happen on my Ky buck this season. Shot was full on broadside,steep downward angle. Arrow went in a little high, which should have been good on the angle of the shot. However after I recovered the deer over a day later with no blood trail I found the cause. The arrow had deflected back and came out low and 8" back in the intestines. Complete pass through, but the broad head had pulled the intestines out and plugged the hole. Still have no clue as to what caused the arrow to do what it did? Just one of those strange things that can happen in archery hunting

 

[Milo]

Had a similar thing happen on my Ky buck this season. Shot was full on broadside,steep downward angle. Arrow went in a little high, which should have been good on the angle of the shot. However after I recovered the deer over a day later with no blood trail I found the cause. The arrow had deflected back and came out low and 8" back in the intestines. Complete pass through, but the broad head had pulled the intestines out and plugged the hole. Still have no clue as to what caused the arrow to do what it did? Just one of those strange things that can happen in archery hunting

what broadhead?

 

[ImpalaSSpeed96]

That's insane Greg, I've never seen anything like that! And I'm very surprised she lived that long with two injuries to vital organs.

 

[Fluteman]

There has been a fair amount of discussion lately about shot placement and the subsequent tracking job. I've decided to share the details of my doe kill from last month, so we can all learn from my experience.

A little background: for those of you that know me, it will come as no surprise that I am extremely anal about how my equipment shoots. Milo turned me on to bow tuning, and from there on out, I have spent countless hours fine tuning my equipment in preparation for the upcoming season. This year was no different, and although I wasn't prepared as early as I would have like to have been, I had my bow shooting darts and grouping field points with broadheads. I felt confident out to 50y with broadheads, but that confidence typically shrinks to about 30y when I actually step foot into the woods.

I'm shooting a Hoyt Spyder Turbo at 28.5" and 66lbs, and it's sending a 348gr arrow tipped with a Slick Trick Magnum at 298fps with a KE of 68.6. I realize this isn't the heaviest setup in the world, but up until this point, I had no reason to consider shooting something different.

Now for the story...

The Perfect Shot That Wasn't

My season had started off like almost every other, I had plans of harvesting a doe to get the "monkey" of my back and brush the cobwebs off before the good hunting rolled around. I had been running a camera in a shot I call the Berry Patch an it had revealed that there were does in there feeding morning and evening. On October 25th, I made my way to the Berry Patch for an evening hunt. It was warm and I was late getting in the tree, but I had the perfect wind and was going to shoot a doe if one gave me an opportunity.

At 5:20, I had a fawn come in behind me and begin feeding in the edge of the woodline. This deer would hang out in bow range the rest of the evening. Shortly after, I had a single doe pop out on the far end of the field and begin feeding in my direction. As she closed the distance, a second doe with two fawns came out of the logging road to my west and joined the lone doe to graze in the field. As they continued to feed my way, I started picking my windows out for a shot. The doe with the two fawns was huge, but I elected to take the head doe, as she was alone. As she approached 20y, I hit record on the GoPro, came to full draw, settling my pin, and watching as a blue Nockturnal buried right in the very spot my pin was placed. She mule kicked and took off on a death run, circling back around in the direction she came. I lost sight of her, so I wasn't sure where she had piled up, but I was positive I had "smoked her."

I sat in my stand for another hour before deciding to climb down and take up the trail. At the point of impact, I found where she had kicked up dirt, but there was no blood. Sweeping the field and the general direction she ran off in, I still hadn't found any blood. It was beginning to get dark, so I headed back to the Jeep to drop off my bow and dress down a bit, and grab a better light. As I came down off the hill, I noticed what I thought was a 5 gallon bucket on the far hillside in the field across the road. I didn't think much of it, until I stumbled coming off the hill and nearly bit the dust as I stepped into the township road. When I looked back up, the 5 gallon bucket was gone: was that a deer?

I began to get that sick to your stomach feeling, but told myself that there was no way that could be my deer. After dropping my gear off and grabbing a light, I went back up to the spot she was standing when I shot and started looking for blood again. I looked for over a half hour and didn't find so much as a drop of blood, not even the arrow! As I headed back to the Jeep to call for reinforcements, discouraged, I decided to take a walk across the road to that spot where I saw the white object earlier. I was dark now, and as I approached the area where I had seen it, I found a bed and a couple spots of blood. It wasn't much blood, but what was there was very mucousy. As I stood there in disbelief, I heard a deer jump up and bound off 20y or so just over the crest from me in a thin strip of brush. I know the words WTF came out of my mouth as I turned around and headed back to the Jeep.

I was absolutely destroyed; how in the hell did this doe make it 300y without hardly bleeding, and why in the hell was she still alive almost two hours later. Replaying the shot through my head, I began to question my shot placement. The only option was to back out and give her more time, so I headed for the house. On the way there, I called the wife and my BIL and told them I needed help tracking a deer I had shot. I pulled in the drive and they were both ready to roll, but I wanted to give her more time. I remembered that I had recorded the shot, so I pulled the card and stuck it in the computer, hoping to find some evidence of what had went wrong. I must've watched the shot a hundred times, but didn't see anything that pointed to a bad shot.

Here's the video (if you click on the settings tab, you can play adjust the playback speed)

[video=youtube;Al9GB2KnMS4]https://youtu.be/Al9GB2KnMS4[/video]

At 9:30, we decided to head back out and pick up the trail. I told my BIL on the way out that if we bumped her again, we were done for the night and I would head back out to look for her in the morning, as it was going to be a cold night. We made it back to the bed and I showed them the blood, and we took off in the direction she had headed. There was no blood to be found. About 30y in from the bed, I hear a deer jump up close to the same area I heard the deer run off earlier in the night. I told the wife and BIL I was positive that was her and it was time to back out. My BIL wasn't so sure and wanted to press on. Going off my gut, I told him we needed to back out. I was worried though, as the deer was headed towards the property line, and decided to circle around and come down the line, hoping if it was her, we would push her away from the line. The plan worked like a charm and we heard the deer jump up and go 30y back towards my parcel. As we backed out, I told my BIL I was positive that was her, and that she was hurting bad based on how she acted. It was killing me though that she had suffered for four hours already and wasn't dead.

Sleep didn't come easy that night, as I was up almost every hour checking on the time. The next morning, I gathered my gear and headed back to the place where we had bumped her last. There was a nice vantage point overlooking a hillside full of brush, and I had planned to glass from there before backtracking and hoping to find more blood. As I scanned the hillside, I caught a vertical line that stood out, and realized it was a deer. She was bedded up tight to a bunch of downed trees right at the edge of the field. I decided to circle around from the field and verify she was dead, and thankfully, she had expired.

I was anxious to take a look at her to figure out where in the hell everything went so terribly wrong. I pulled her out of the brush and was immediately dumbfounded. The entrance hole was spot on, center mass just behind the right behind the shoulder, but the exit was not what I had expected at all...

Entrance:

Exit:

Carnage:

How the hell did my exit hole come out higher than the entry hole? I mean, I was 20' up a tree when I shot, and I was obviously clear of the shoulder. The autopsy revealed the back ten inches of arrow helped keep the holes plugged up, as it was still wedged in place. After removing it and her vitals, I discovered that I had put a complete hole in the very top of the nearside lung, and a single slice in the offside lung. Upon further inspection, I also found that I had dead centered a rib on impact. At first, I still wasn't sure how this all happened. Reflecting back now, I believe as the boadhead shattered the rib, the bottom portion of the rib was forced inside the ribcage, springing up, and changing the course of direction. At least that's the best I can come up with.

So, what did I learn from this crazy night? First, nothing is absolute, things happen beyond our control. I'm not sure I could have put that arrow in a better spot. Second, when in doubt, back out. If I hadn't followed my gut and we continued pushed that deer, I firmly believe I never would have found her the next day. There was no blood to be found, other than in the first bed I found, not even in the second bed. I also question whether a heavier arrow would have done the same thing.[/QUOTE]


Updated per Photobucket hosing it all up!

 

[NWOHhunter]

Really cool write up! Thanks for the story and information!