80 Mississippi Sportsman^ | April 2015
haPPy trails
Bill Garbo
O
ne recent cold, damp January morn-
ing, as I sat in my ground blind
watching and hoping for a mature
late-season buck, my cell phone in the
pocket of my coat vibrated.
I thought that it was my son
Jason, who was on a stand a few
hundred yards away, contacting
me by text to report on what he
was seeing. Instead the text was
from another family member
who was deer hunting with a
friend on a nearby tract of land
about a 10-minute drive away.
The gist of the message was that
a big buck with a large rack had
just been shot. I quickly texted
back a congratulatory reply and
asked for a few basic details.
The buck was standing per-
fectly still and broadside, and
although the shot was long, it
was taken from a steady rest
with a good trigger squeeze.
At the shot, the buck had
appeared to jump and then
run with its tail tucked straight
ahead into the wood line with
that classic “death run.”
Everything sounded good, but a
quick check of my weather radar
app showed a line of moderately
heavy rain on the way, so I texted
back a caution to quietly climb down and
get to the spot where the deer was stand-
ing when the shot was taken to check for
blood sign before the rain hit.
It wasn’t long before I began to hear the
tattoo of rain drops on the top of my blind.The deer were not moving much on that particular
morning where Jason and I were hunting, so when
the rain tapered off we both decided to hike on out
and head over to assist in the search for the buck.
With the unexpected rainfall, unless it was a
squarely mortal hit, any blood trail might have been
washed out and obliterated. To further complicate
the search, the area into which the buck ran is very
thick and brushy; in spots, you could easily walk
within a few yards of a deer and not even see it.
If a blood trail is scant or has washed out, the more
eyes looking the better. A successful recovery often
requires a lot of time and patience to find the deer.
We were given directions to drive to a particular
woods road, where we found the hunters’ truck parked
at the edge of a long, skinny ridge-top food plot.
Upon joining them inside the wood line, we found
out that as soon as the buck exited the food plot he
began to leave a good blood trail.
The blood sign continued down slope and into a
thicket that was laced with deer trails.
One key clue was that the blood was dark red,
which indicated a likely liver or paunch hit.
The more blood sign we found the more we
became convinced that it was a liver wound and
had nothing to do with the paunch, as there was
absolutely no stomach matter or tissue to be found.
After all, the buck had been standing perfectly
broadside when hit.
A deer’s liver is actually quite large, about 10 by 6
inches when viewed from the front, but with the
liver anatomically tucked in right behind the dia-
phragm, it sits somewhat vertically, which presents
a very thin target when viewed from the side.
Liver hits, I believe, prove to be fatal almost all the
time, with the wounded quarry succumbing within
one to four hours, depending on just how severely
damaged the liver is.
By the time my son and I arrived it had been a goodunravelling a blood trail
Sometimes we can be fooled
This buck, which was wounded at the
bottom of the chest a week before, bled
as if it had been shot in the liver. But it
survived until killed chasing a doe.Bill Garbo is a petroleum
engineer and avid whitetail
hunter from Madison, Miss.
He has lived and hunted out
west and taken numerous
big game species, but hunt-
ing big old mature southern
whitetail bucks is his favorite
pursuit by a country mile.