Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Ever lose an animal you felt was well hit?

Last evening I had a Doe come half running past me at 25 yards. I took a shot with my 45-70 and felt I connected. I found some hair but no blood and it got dark. I looked for awhile today and finally found it dead. I hit it behind the front shoulder with a 405 grain bullet and the bullet exited through the liver on the far side. Not a drop of blood anywhere and because it warmed up today the deer was spoiled. Made me remember a time my son shot a buck at 150 yards with his 270 and a 130 grain ballistic tip.The buck cow kicked at the shot and took off. We gave it a half hour and had a great blood trail. Even some pink foamy lung blood. That blood trail petered out after a couple hundred yards and we never did find that buck. Sometimes things just don't add up.

No, not yet but close. Not a good feeling at all.

Yes a 5 by elk, but a buddy coming in at the sound of my shot put it down about 100 yds from were I ran out of sign.

Most everyone who hunts long enough will have this happen

I second that idea. Cheers NC

Heard a man tell his son this, “Son you’re not going to hit every deer you shoot at and you’re not going to find every deer you hit...it just works out that way”. He was right.

I’ve lost a few well hit deer in my long hunting career...most to the bullets that I see advertised in this thread.

Decades ago my brother shot a whitetail doe at 150 yards. We both heard the whomp of a solid hit, I saw the dear react to the shot. Two of us searching for 45 minutes found nothing to indicate a hit either where the deer was standing or along the path we saw it run to exit the field.

I think where one hunts affects the risk of losing an animal. We tend to hunt more open ground, most times when we hunt timber there is snow on the ground. The animals reaction to and movements after the shot are easier to observe in open ground or poplar glades as potential follow up shots to take.

One day in Texas my son and I were "tagged out" and spent a day trying help two guides recover a wounded deer (dropped to the shot, hunter felt no need to shot a dead deer again so no follow up) thick, nasty bush full of cats claw i think its called; like wait a bush light. The ground was limestone with very little soil so following tracks any distance was impossible for me, We never found the deer and I ruined a pair of jeans. Our guide was a keep shooting until he's down guy and make damn sure he doesn't get to the bush, fully understand why.

The conifer plantations in Scotland are thick nasty cover as well. When I hunted in Hawaii 50 yards line of sight was quite long.

I speculate that those of us that hunt in open ground or gladed woods often with snow lose less game than those who hunt in the thick nasty with no tracking snow. Just because we can see more and often track easier because of ground conditions and snow.

As said previously; hunt long enough and stuff happens.

not yet

Not one well hit. One poorly hit that I simply could not get anotehr shot at. I'll assume she died. Looked for days and never found her or buzzards...

Since we have NO clue what a bullet does on impact or what path it takes, we'll often never really know.

The weirdest one happened to a buddy, called to help look for a cull 8 that had a specific set of antlers. Piece of lung on the ground. Smaller piece a few feet away. A bit of blood for a short distance, maybe 25-50 steps. We looked for hours. Probably close to 4-5 hours total. Eventually probably 7 or 8 of us. Prior to me having a decent tracking dog.

Buck was seen chasing a doe about 3 weeks later and shot in the neck on purpose. Hole in rib center going in and out, cartilage in both lungs healed over.

Also the last time I ever loaded or shot or let anyone else shoot Sierra BTSP game kings on any animal.

They can be tough animals for sure.

With a dog now, I'm 99% sure if the dog doesnt' find them they are not dead. They may die mile or more away depending on how stupid the shooter was in regards to looking for them right away( last weekend we had a bad case but I'm still not sure the deer is dead or will die). But if the shot, and trail are treated correctly I"ve not seen the dog miss a dead deer yet.

Here I've found a couple of them the next morning. As long as its been 60 or less at night I"ve never lost any meat either, other than what varmints may have dined on.

I will say I have found every one I hit well, eventually. Diving into cedar/pine thickets, brush piles, cactus patches can make it a bit tough.

Came in to the lease one night and saw several guys from the neighboring lease out with flashlights looking for one they had tracked from the other side of their lease. One of the guys had found a single drop of blood about 50 yards from our fence and nothing else. I found where the deer jumped the fence to our side, made a loop and crawled under the fence back on their side. 100 yards later I caught the eyes of the deer. Still alive. Called them over and let the original hunter finish it off.

I had one old doe leaving chunks of lung the size of a quarter, but it played out and never found her (young pine plantation thicket). On that same stand a few years later, I had the same thing happen and this doe eventually ran out of steam after 500yds of blowing blood and lung goo everywhere. Never seen anything like it in my 29 years of deer hunting. Maybe the deer in that area were just tough mothers.....(150gr and 168gr Nolser NBT .30cal)

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

Your second story reminds me of one of my own. I shouldn't tell it (I never tell anybody) but what the hell. It was rifle deer season and we were driving the sidehill of a mountain towards our standers. My BIL was directly above me (he wasn't my BIL yet though as I was only 17) and he had already filled his buck tag so he wasn't carrying a gun. All of the sudden I hear him yell "Mike it's a buck shoot"! I turned to see a Spike running down the mountain behind me. I fired five times as he ran out of sight. My BIL said "what the hell did you keep shooting for, he dropped at your second shot"? I said "I seen him keep on running over that way". He replied "he's laying right up there where your second shot dropped him". So he convinced me and we walked up and sure enough there he lay dead. I said "there must have been two of them" and my BIL said "no way, where I wasI had a clear view of the whole side hill below me. I don't know what you were shooting at"?
And I don't either. But I know I saw the buck continue on. Even though he never did.

I lost three bucks in one day on Afognak Island...

First I shot in the neck in deep snow. Dragging him to the beach I found where a brown bear was bedded when I shot... less than 50 yards away. Tied the deer to a huge log on the beach with halibut ground line and went to get the skiff. When we got back the deer was gone, but you could see the trail the bear took while carrying the buck.

A couple miles away I was following the edge of a clearcut and stepped out to the edge on a step knob. Two bucks steeply downhill from me and less than a hundred yards away died. My buddy came out of the woods and looked over the edge in front of me and started laughing.

A bear right below me ran straight away from us and stopped when he found the deer. Only two times I ever lost deer to bears around Kodiak. Carrying a Bob and my buddy was carrying a 223 in an H&K, so chasing bears off deer was not an option.

I took an old acquaintance of mine Bear hunting a few weeks ago. He helped me get my very first turkey about 25 years ago. I recently made contact with him despite not seeing him for maybe 10 years. I told him it was time to pay him back and I wanted to help him get his first bear in return for my first Turkey. He has been Bear hunting a few times, but never laid eyes on one.

I had been baiting up one of my Bear stands for a while and dropped him off. I put myself in a spot where I would hear him shoot if he had any luck. We were texting on and off when I heard his .30-06 Rem pump go off. He called me a few minutes later and said he knocked a decent Blackie down, maybe 200 - 250 pounds but it rolled off and got its feet under him and crashed through crazy THICK woods. I told him to sit tight and not push the bear and I would be there ASAP.

Well, when I got there he told me the Bear came out and spooked a few deer that he was watching. The Bear started to walk toward his stand and I think the fact that he wanted to get one so much got the better of him. He told himself to wait and not shoot, BUT he didn't. The Bear was facing him and walking to him when it stopped for a second and turned its head. He let loose with a neck shot (one of my favorite DRT Bear shots) and dropped the Bear right there on its back. It rolled and ran like its butt was on fire.

My bud couldn't even tell me where the Bear was when he shot. We looked for signs of a hit for a couple of hours and couldn't find anything. I figured if it was a decent hit we would at least find a smear of blood where it went down and rolled. He was pretty sick over it. Thinking he got close to the spine and gave it a good shock. Been back to that spot a few times and never saw buzzads or any sign of a hit.

He went from, I GOT MY FIRST BEAR DOWN! To, I am sick to my stomach. He certainly thought that Bear was well hit! I don't think he thought it was funny when I sent him a picture of my daughter with her Bear just a few days later.

You got guts! I'd be the guy deer hunting SE Alaska with a .338 Win Mag and 250 grain Partitions.

You wouldn’t be alone, I’ve saw more than a few Kodiak blacktails fall to 338s and 375s. Killed my first and best with one shot from my 458 Winchester.

I shot a bunch of deer with the Bob over the years... started inching up the bore over the years, but stopped at 30, mostly. Only shot a couple with the Whelen AI and the 375AI. The rest were mostly 30-06, or one of the 30 magnums. The 308Norma killed a bunch and several different 300WMs, and an H&H, but anything from 30-06 on up is plenty IMO. Most bears causing problems are not the big suckers.

No, I found that moose 10 days later, by nose.. Hair, bones, and maggots. No way to see him from more than one step away, and he had only gone about 100yards. It was that thick in there. I took to CNS (or no) shots on moose after that in those kind of conditions.

Nice buck this year.
I shot an Accubond at 3100fps from my 270 through the front shoulders. Dumped him on his nose and he shoved along pushing with his hind feet. He was into the brush so fast that a second shot wasn't possible. I listened for him to pile up and heard a gunshot in the direction he had gone. Shortly after he entered the brush he crossed over onto posted land. I followed him about 120yds and the blood trail was substantial. Came out onto a road and there was a man putting his tag on him. When he saw me he said, My deer. I killed him. I asked where did you hit him? He said, none of your f-ing business where I hit it, You're on posted land. Get off! GET OFF!

Shot my first whitetail in 1953 with a 22 LR. Shot a lot of them since then with bore sizes from .22 to 12ga. I've seen them hit in the shoulders and push with their hind feet a little ways (10-15 yards) The tracks indicated he would take 2-3 jumps and then plow leaves for 5-10feet. then jump a few more and do it again. Blood trail showed that he wasn't going far but I didn't get him.