Interesting development, and no I didn’t take pics as it was dark and cold and I’d been at work for 13 hours prior.
Getting my wife’s buck skinned and quartered the other night and I got to looking. A neighbor who hunts a couple miles away said he’d had that buck on his cameras for several years and a friend he let hunt had shot him in the shoulder with his bow and got no penetration and obviously didn’t recover him.
He had at one time broken his left front leg down right below the knee and it had grown back a little off kilter with a knot about like a 20ga shell of bone down the side where the break had knit back. He had a rib about halfway down the right side that had been broken and grown back at an angle fusing to the adjacent rib as well as the original break. And he had a big white gristle, for lack of a better term on the top rear of his right shoulder blade. Completely healed and no infection or anything so obviously old. Above and behind the shoulder growth the spinal process had been broken off and grew/fused back at approximately a 75 degree angle leaning to the side and rearward. His backstrap made a turn and went around this big bone growth.
The shoulder and back injury seems consistent with the neighbor’s story.
Pretty amazing what they can endure sometimes and further reason why I cringe sometimes when I read of guys “mercy killing” a deer with a broken leg.
