212 Louisiana Sportsman^ | April 2015
HAppy TRAils continued
in a large, wallowed-out bed in a thick clump of brush that was
covered with blood sign,
We slowly and quietly circled out from the bed, but could not
find so much as another drop of blood. Our deduction was that
the buck was near death in the bed and, upon seeing us in the
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. ■To Browse Our Complete Inventory, visit our website at:
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