Yep. Two, maybe three.
First was the "maybe". My father and I were hunting heavy brush under thick canopy down in a canyon in the pouring rain. Saw a back. Looked goofy, the horns almost glowed. I wasn't comfortable with the shot but dad was pushing me to shoot so I did. Y' do that at 17-18 I guess. Deer didn't go down. We looked for a couple hours but with it raining so hard, and light a bit dim, there was no blood trail. Gave up. A week later, 5 miles away, I found a dead buck with a bullet hole through the middle. The damned things horns had been painted orange. I suspect that's the "glow" I saw but it is real hard to figure how a deer as apparently solidly shot as that one looked made it 5 miles. So ... dunno. Maybe I flushed it and someone else shot it.
The second was a blunder on my part. I shot a small 4x4 blacktail out in a field with a .25-'06 with 120 grain partitions. After recoil, I saw the deer running off somewhat diagonally up hill and go into the brush a quarter mile away. Rather than go to where the deer was when I shot, I "saved time" by going to where I saw it go into the brush. I looked around for quite a while. No blood. I couldn't find it's tracks with certainty because there were so many more tracks. Gave up, went home. 2 days later I was back in the same spot and noticed buzzards right where it'd been when I shot so I went over to look. There were the skeletal remains of a dead buck stripped of hide and all but a few ribbons of meat, a small 4x4 rack, a bullet nick on a rib on the entry side and 2 ribs with chunks representing about a 2 inch hole on the exit side. Unless that deer I shot went a quarter mile to the timber, then some other direction, then somehow came back to the same spot to die ... there must have been two bucks, one I didn't see.
The last was a bear. I was handgun hunting early in deer season. After the morning hunt I got back to my truck and laid my 5.5" barreled Super Blackhawk beside my 5.5" barreled single six .32 mag which I'd brought to shoot squirrels mid day before going back to hunt deer. I was in the driver's seat of my truck, leaned back, sandwich in hand, and a bear walked by. Without taking my eye off the bear, I reached down and grabbed my .44. Back up a sec .. I'd been talking to JD Jones and bought a bullet mold from him so I was shooting hard cast 285 grain bullets from my .44. I decided if they'd penetrate 7 feet of elephant skull surely they'd penetrate 18-24 inches of bear to do a "texas heart shot". I stepped out without looking down, pistol in hand, thumbed the hammer, lined up the sights on "the little brown spot", and squeezed the trigger. I was anticipating .. well, Marvin the Martian is my hero and I was expecting an earth-shattering KABOOM. Instead, I got a nasty little "pop". The effin' bear dropped, then bounced up and ran straight away at the top of a low ridge about 40 yards from me. This was followed by a long drawn out scream. I was in triple-layer WTF mode ... "pop"? Bear run? Scream? I looked down at my hand ... I'd grabbed the wrong single action and shot that bear right in up the "poop chute" with a Hornady 85 grain .312" hollow point. OMFG. I had hysterical giggles mixed with denial 'cause I couldn't really get my head around what I'd done. I swapped guns and ran up to the ridge top where the bear disappeared. There was no back side to that ridge, there was a 200 foot vertical drop into a jumble of huge boulders covered with brush. The scream was the bear falling towards death. I finally found a way down, looked around for a while, couldn't find it even though I was sure it was there. I came back a couple days later and there were lots of crows and buzzards. I never did figure out where it was, figure it bounced down into a hole between the boulders, some bigger than a house.
If you're out there long enough, something will go wrong. That doesn't mean we have to accept something going wrong TODAY. Those past things are a lot of motivation to be even more careful, more deliberate, more calculating, and willing to walk away. I ate my deer tag this year because the shot opportunity I had was too far for the groups my gun was shooting at the range to reliably land in a quick-kill area. "Maybe" is for varmints, not deer.
Tom
