M_S_2015_04_

82 Mississippi Sportsman^ | April 2015

haPPy trails continued

distance, got up and staggered straight away, probably expiring within a short distance. At this point it had been at least four hours since the deer was shot, so we were very confident that a slow and deliberate visual search would locate it. To make a long story short, the four of us performed a meticu- lous back-and-forth search for another several hours, scouring the entire area — even fanning out for quite a distance on the back-trail, just in case the buck had circled back on us. And then it started raining again. We never found more sign of the buck. We all left for home that afternoon puzzled and perplexed, but confident that we had done everything within our power to find the buck under the prevailing conditions. Now, here comes the real lesson in all of this. Our friend was hunting on the property about a week later and was on stand about 600 or 700 yards away from where we lost the blood trail. It was during the late portion of the rut and, after being on stand a while, he heard crashing and grunting as a buck and an estrus doe serpentined back and forth through the brushy area he was watching. When the deer came into full view, he immediately identified the buck as a mature shooter and lowered the boom on it. The buck dropped at the shot, and the hunter climbed down from his stand to go and check the deer out. Upon closer examination, he realized that the buck was

a known shooter of which he had trail camera photos, but strangely the buck in the trail cam photos was the one that we had blood trailed the previous week. The hunter immediately began to look the buck over closely and was startled by what he found. The buck had a fresh scabby wound on his chest skin right behind his front legs. The previous week’s shot by my family member had been per- fect windage wise, but it was about 6 inches or so low due the long range of the shot and the apparent failure to apply eleva- tion to the aim point. The bullet clipped the buck’s chest as if the skin had been sliced with a sharp knife, but it had inflicted only minor muscle damage, having barely left a furrow in the exposed wound. Such a wound should have dropped some white chest hair at the point of contact, but we never found any — so we were totally fooled and confused during the search. He said the buck was chasing the estrus doe hard, with no vis- ible indication of any difficulty from the old wound. Lessons were learned, and the wounded buck was ultimately recovered. Every blood-trailing job is unique, with its own set of circum- stances and difficulties. Unravelling a blood trail is a science unto itself, and no matter what your level of experience is we would all do well to bone up on deer anatomy. ■

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