210 Louisiana Sportsman^ | April 2015
HAppy TRAils
Bill Garbo
One
recent cold, damp January
morning, 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 stand-
ing perfectly 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 clas-
sic “death run.”
Everything sounded good, but a quickcheck 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 standing 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 byunravelling a blood trail
Sometimes we can be fooled
This buck, which was wounded on the
bottom of the chest a week before, bled as
if it had been shot in the liver. But the deer
survived until it was 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.