Claro, last year I had a odd, and slightly similar situation on a whitetail buck. He weighed approximately 165 lbs and came in very late. Last minute of legal shooting light.
I Shot him at 22 yards broadside with a 467 grain arrow at 283 FPS. I was shooting a Black Eagle Rampage 300 with Easton Brass HIT inserts and a NAP Spitfire Double Cross.
The sound when the arrow hit sounded like a .22. It was windy and raining and I couldn’t hear him go down, but I knew I would start losing the blood trail due to rain so I started looking after 10 minutes. I walked up to where I shot him and found the arrow. There was no broadhead, nor was the insert there, but the arrow was full length with the first 1.5” broken and the pieces hanging by a thread.
If I had a lighted nock I would have seen what you did, because there wasn’t a nock in the shaft and it was nowhere to be found.
I only had about 10” of blood and tissue on the arrow, which told me I didn’t get much penetration. I had no broadhead or insert, but a full length arrow. It was dark, so I didn’t see him step on the arrow to break it, but if he had, the BH would have been right there or at least near by. What the heck?
So I started trying to find blood. I finally found a drop about 5 yards from the spot I shot him. I found a drop every three yards or so. I lost the trail 3 or 4 times and kept doubling back. The leaves were all wet, and getting wetter, which made blood hard to spot. Even when I did find it, it was specks and not spots. I finally saw a (relatively) big pink and red glob on the ground after about 40 yards. I bent down to look and it was my broadhead screwed into my brass insert. Broadhead was deployed and covered in tissue. You could see the epoxy in the grooves of the insert.
I looked about a yard ahead of the broadhead and started finding puddles and puddles of blood, for only about 5-7 yards, and he was laying right there.
When I shot, I hit the onside leg, had a great entrance wound with full deployment. The arrow went through the onside lung, through the front of the heart, and caught the bottom of the offside lung just barely. As it exited out the armpit it came out of the ribs and into the offside leg. When it hit the offside leg the broadhead still had enough force to shear the epoxy and send BH back into the shaft, splintering it and forcing the entire arrow shaft back out the wound channel and on the ground.
The BH was stuck in the exit wound and prevented much blood from exiting until he crossed the shallow, dry creek bed when the BH fell out from between his ribs and leg, letting the blood escape easier.
I’m wondering if you didn’t have something like that happen? I have since switched to halfserts and if I go back to the HITs I will use the Black Eagle epoxy.
