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

Yes, I have fed the coyotes and or buzzards on a few sorry occasions. Whether they were well hit or I botched the shot I'll never know because the deer was lost. I will say that I have found enough deer that were shot well that were very hard to find to make me believe that it happens. The toughest ones were cases where I hit broadside deer right behind the shoulder and the bullet deflected and exited out of the guts in one case and in another the bullet was found just under the hide in the offside ham....completely bisecting the deer at a 45 degree angle. Those deer did not bleed a drop, ran a long way, and our finding them was just luck. Had I lost those deer as I very easily could have, I would have been dumbfounded as the shots were close and I had a rest. Every gun shot wound is different. It does not always go our way and blaming the cartridge or the bullet is an exercise in futility IMO. None of them have a perfect track record.

Terrain is everything. For the last 7 years I have been hunting on a lease of what used to be timber company property. A lot of the property was logged off and not replanted so it has grown back in volunteer pines, brush and briars....when you get in that stuff trailing a deer, you can't see but a few feet. A deer that runs into that stuff and does not leave any sign to track is a real problem even if he only goes 50 yards, whereas the same situation in more open country, the hunter could watch the deer fall. I shot a doe this year that probably only went 30 yards but it took me and another guy an hour to find. I busted her with a 30-06 and she ran into the "woods" but I could not see which way she went. I did not have much blood and after it petered out, the deer made a hard right turn. We kept looking in the direction of the trail, walking in the opposite direction from where the deer was laying. A week later, I shot another one with the same rifle and load, essentially the same shot placement that left a trail "a blind man could follow" that I found in 5 minutes. That's hunting in the real world.

The craziest thing is sometimes guys get away with piss poor shot placement without much trouble. A buddy earlier this year shot a little 8 point just ahead of the diaphragm and evidently hit the liver, maybe the back of the lungs. The deer ran no great distance, left plenty of blood and was easy to find. Could have easily been a different story.

I would be scared to look for a wounded bear.

When I shifted my aim point further foreword and lower on the animal.

The not being able to recover them quickly has about disappeared.

The artistic renditions on most educational material about the anatomy of deer and elk illustrate too much lung field behind the front leg IMO.

They also minimize the amount of dorsal spinous process above the thoracic rib area and size of the scapula.

The double lung " meat saver " shot although when it works is a splendid accomplishment. However leaves little margin for error, and will often lead to " liver ,diaphragm ,bowel" involvement.

Aiming too high can cause the shot to go through the back straps, missing the boiler room!

Loosing critters does happen-regardless of the shot/bullet-but it is pretty rare IME. I have yet to see a shot that I felt was a solid hit in the boiler room that I didn't recover, but a few did take some searching.

I have lost a couple critters over the years, but I am not convinced they were hit very well. It's a bummer and you try to learn from the experience to not let it happen again, but you'd be pretty naive to think it'll never happen again. I have seen some blood trails that have run cold after initially looking promising. It is frustrating, but it does happen.

Terrain does play a large part, and I do much prefer more open country for various reasons.

I have lost what would of been my best Mule deer, hit it at 100yds broadside, must of been abit far forward,,,6.5x55 swede, 120gr speer sp.
I saw the blood in the snow and as I was looking for it in the thick bush there he was about 30ft away laying, I couldn't finish him off as there was scrub in the way, he gets up and runs uphill for about 100 yds then doubles back and runs about 1 mile into a canyon with about 45 degree slope, the snow melted and at the lower elevation I lost him I looked all day, then the next day, then the next weekend, no sign of him.
A beautiful buck, its a sinking feeling, but when you have hunted for along time its going to happen.

My hunting partner hit a cow elk broadside at 60 yards with a .444 Marlin. There was a huge bright red blood-splash where she was shot. We tracked her for 3 miles. There were places where she stopped and we could see blood splashes and then she would take off again. and we were following drops. Then - NOTHING. No blood. We marked the blood trail, and the last blood spot and started making circles, looking for blood. We never found any more blood after searching for several hours. The next day, I was walking a fence line about a 1/2 mile away from our last blood sign and found a blood smear on the top wire. She had moved onto private. We tried to contact the landowner to get permission to look for her, but no dice. Called the Sheriff and asked for help getting access, but no dice. The weird thing is that despite the blood on the wire, there was no sign leading up to where she jumped. I still don't know how the hell she went so far with a broadside, bloody-gushing hit from a 265 grain bullet.

No
But have spent over 18 hrs. finding 2 6pt. bull elk & finishing them through the yrs.

I've done it quite a bit. We used to put on drives for bears and the guys liked to shoulder shoot bears with deer loads. I followed Bears shot with 270,308,30-06, 7mm mag, 300 mag. All left great blood trails that ultimately completely petered out. None were shot by me. I found mine because I stayed behind the shoulder.

Almost forgot, the longest blood trail I ever followed on a Bear was shot with a 30-30 at 25 yards. It seemed like we had blood for a mile.

I wonder, if a deer would have been considered spoiled 200 years ago?

A buddy and I were bow hunting one year when we were in high school. Walking side by side down a trail back to the truck when we hear a crashing in the brush getting closer. All the sudden a yearling doe pops out not 5 yards away and locks up the brakes. We both had an arrow knocked and let fly one right after the other. We were both shooting Martin 50# recurves, he shot Zwickey Eskimo broadheads and I was using Bear Razorhead II’s. His arrow buried about 2/3 of the shaft through her chest tight behind the shoulder before she turned and broke the shaft and I had a complete pass through right in the throat patch. There was so much blood it was unbelievable, horror movie amounts of blood. And we followed it for about 400 yards to where it ended, at the water’s edge, on a 3500 acre lake.

All we could figure is that she ran out into the lake and sunk. We searched up and down the shoreline for a couple hours and went back over the blood trail a couple more times but the deer had just vanished.

Had a wounded moose go into a lake,but it floated.

My buddy and I were making a two man Wisconsin drive on a small island in a chain of lakes. He was the driver and I was on stand. A bull moose showed up about 50 yards away and I put the cross hairs behind his shoulder and sent a Hornady 154 grain at him from my M70 7x57. Puff, he disappeared into the underbrush. The sight picture was good and was confident it was a good hit.

I walked over to where I had last seen him and found hair and a small amount of blood. That was it, so I made a couple half circles from that spot, nothing. Heard my buddy whistle on a empty cartridge case and I answered with same. We met up and widened the search area, but multiple moose tracks hindered the search. Finally, one set of tracks looked promising because it looked like the animal would stumble. We followed the tracks to a brushy shoreline of water and could not see where the moose went up or down the shoreline, came back to last set of tracks and figured it went into the water and sank or made it to the other side.

We gave one last look of the area before going after the canoe and check the opposite shore for tracks and I spotted a brown hump in the water. It is at 4 o'clock near the tall thin tree in the foreground of the pic. This moose traveled over 150 yards with a lung shot and a liver hit.

I lost the first two deer of my life this year. The first one jumped the string and was just plain a bad hit

The second was a perfect shot. I watched the arrow go through the deer just behind the shoulder and when the deer jumped it was stuck in the ground centered in the scope. 50 feet or so away the fist blood was about 1/2 a cup of thick partially clotted blood typical of a lung hit. I had good blood except for a very short distance gap for 100 yards to the edge of that property. Better blood for 100 yards across a mowed lawn. Down a hill to a swamp and he was stopping every six feet where he'd stand and bleed about a cup out. lost the trail in the swamp for a bit. Came back in the light early the next day, found where he stood wanting to get over a 4 foot fence but couldn't. Followed decent blood along the fence a couple hundred yards to where I found the last blood. There was only maybe three acres of cover and I searched all of it three times. I searched around the trail back they way I'd come. With that amount of blood on the ground I have never seen a deer not die inside a hundred yards. No sign from the crows or coyotes of a dead deer in the area. My better sense tells me it's dead there somewhere, but I sure as hell can't find it.

Only one with a bow and one with a rifle and both of them were hit very high lung, below the spine. I call it a dead zone which is kind of a misnomer because my deer didn't get dead where I wanted them to if they even died at all. I have had some long trailing jobs in snow that I actually kind of enjoyed, even though I hadn't put the first shot into the deer. I drove out an 11 point to a buddy who hit it low gut just in front of the rear leg. One drop of blood and Bobby gave up on it after only a hundred yards. I took that track about a mile and even through a frozen over trout stream pushing ice out of the way with my gun butt holding my pants and boots up over my head. I jumped it up in that river bed and cracked it again.

One Thanksgiving morning I found a big deer bed in the snow with blood in it with a big track leading out of it. With nothing else to do I took that track for miles and found a bone chip, short hair and drag marks, so I knew I was looking for a leg hit deer. I only saw that deer once that afternoon and got a shot at it, but I hit it real low and far back. Late by then so a buddy and I got on it again the next day. We jumped it up again and one of us cut a bunch of hair across its back with a bullet. I near ran that deer out of blood and thank goodness for all that loose hair as that was what I tracked it by sometimes. I caught up with it again in a cedar swamp and ended it, a nice 8 point.

That deer convinced me that if I could follow one far enough, that I could get it. One late December bow season I had a young doe that I hit from my afternoon stand. I heard the arrow hit, there was some blood and I jumped her up from her first bed that afternoon. Perfect tracking conditions the next day and did we ever go the distance. Miles and every time she put her foot down there was a drop of blood. Strange she didn't look wounded when I'd see her, but there was that drop of blood and I was going to run her out of blood one drop at a time. Long story short, I caught up to her and double lunged her with another arrow because she acted like she just gave up. That first shot had cut a 1" slice above her back hoof never even breaking the bone. Admittedly a lousy shot, but I was glad that I got her and glad that she went down near a woods road in the middle of the National Forest.

Knocked a middling sized (About 120lb) hog off it's feet with a 50 cal muzzleloader. It was doing the usual kicking and squealing routine while I was reloading, then got up and ran. No blood trail, never found it.

Those hogs are way tougher than any deer that I ever ran into. Some of us went hog hunting down in Tennessee and one of our guys shot a big black one in the neck with a .30-06 and it ran away! We didn't think that Tony had made a very good shot on it until I got that same hog leading about a dozen smaller ones that afternoon at least half a mile away. There was a hole it that hog's neck that you could put your fist into. Extremely tough animals.

I didn't know Wisconsin ever had a Moose season.

Not sure I follow you?

I think a lot of critters hit-whether marginally or not-survive when the hunter assumes they didn't.

No doubt a lot do die and are never found either because the hunter didn't put much effort into it, they didn't know what they were doing, or the critter ran a ways before dying, but I have seen enough and killed enough animals with old bullet and arrow wounds in them scared over that I really think a lot of "for sure" dead animals end up surviving to be shot another day.

You are likely right. There was an old bull elk that would winter near our house each year but I never could find him during elk season. Finally a friend managed to shoot him. They found 4 separate arrowheads with short sections of broken off arrow in him including one that'd been shot straight up his ass, all old and encased in scar tissue.

Tom