Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Any Ever Shot Any Game That "Got Away"

Yep, lost a mule deer buck many years ago..243, 100 gr. Hornady, high lung shot- maybe through the fabled dead zone. I'll never know,hours of tracking/looking/hunting yeilded nothing.That was my only loss on big game, and it still haunts me. None of the critters deserve that, but as many have said, if you hunt enough, it will happen....
I have had a couple real long hard adventures making sure this didn't happen...one on a bull elk, and one on a leopard. Theres a story there, and a reason I sign my name.....
Ingwe

There have been a couple of grouse...three I think. One I called the titanium grouse. Hit him at least three times with my .22 and he still flew away.

Shot another with the .22 pistol. I was on the back of my horse and was pulling a pack horse. By the time I got off and tied them both up the grouse rallied enough to get a running start and got airborne. He flew down into a canyon and that was that.


Shot one with an arrow. Arrow blew right through him and he flew off but he wasn't going to live very long.

I've wounded one deer and one elk but made follow up shots and killed them.

I've already told my story.My only loss in 40years of hunting.I'll never tell if another one happens...you can bet your sweet a$$ on that. powdr

Yes; two deer.One a doe I creased low at about 300 yards with a 30/06.My fault,since I was not very steady and knew it. I hit low,judging by hair.We had snow and followed for a long way and the better part of the day.The bleeding stopped,she got in with other deer and we never caught up to her.

Another was with a bow;again hit low and a creasing shot.never got her either but I watched her walk off and she appeared OK....

A large mule deer buck was hit a bit far back, on the run,and I caught up with him in his bed, about 1/2 mile away;too weak to rise.I finished him ther at about 30 yards.Got lucky......

Bigfoot.

Any lost game at any of our camps has ALWAYS been bad hits. Sometimes well hit animals go further than we think they should, but the couple that have been lost have always been bad hits.

I know a guy who shot a turkey with a single shot shotgun
several years ago. He said it dropped at the shot and didnt
even flop around, thinking it was dead, he walked up to it
without reloading. You guessed it, it came back to life
and took off like lightning. He never found it.

Yep. I lost a mule deer doe when I was in high school because I thought it would be cool to take a really long shot when I could easily have cut the distance in half. The rifle was a .270 Win and the shot was taken right before dark. From the reaction of the deer I know I hit it in the guts. The loss of that deer had nothing to do with the caliber or the bullet it was purely me overestimating my ability to shoot long.

About 15 years ago I hit a bull elk that I never recovered. The only shot I had was a neck shot on the bull going pretty much straight away. The bull went ass over tea kettle at the shot, but by the time I got to where I could see where it fell, the bull was gone. I found a few drops of blood a couple hundred yards away and followed the tracks for the rest of the day and never did lay eyes on it again. At one point the bull made a quarter mile climb uphill before it got onto a south slope where there was no snow and lots of other elk tracks. That is where the trail ended for me. I was my overwhelming desire to fill my elk tag every year (a big deal in the west) to take a crappy shot. Rifle was .270 Win and 150 Partitions.

Several years ago I shot a WT buck right after daylight at roughly 230 yards. The buck stepped forward just as the trigger broke and I knew from the shot pic in my mind that I hit too far back which turned out to be exactly right. I followed the few specks of blood and then scuffs in the dirt for several hundred yards before I jumped the buck again. This went on for the rest of the day and then right before dark I jumped the buck and got a shot in the heavy timber that killed the buck. I was as absolutely mentally drained as I have ever been in my life when I finally finished off that buck. The painstaking tracking and emotional highs and many lows over whether I would ever find it made me feel like a wet noodle. 270 Win and 150 Pt's the bullet exited, but the shot was too far back for a quick kill.

Lost my first hit deer with a bow this year, actually. Small doe, less than 10 yards from stand. Arrow entered way low on the body, and combined with steep angle of the shot, figuring I missed vitals completely. Lots of blood at first, fat on the arrow, figured she was hit good. My buddy had seen her limping some, and had he known I just shot her, would've finished the job as he walking to my stand. We tracked her for over half a mile through saplings, briars, and other brushy type stuff. This was early September, so lots of lush vegetation still around. We lost the trail many times, ended up giving up after the blood thinned to very small drips every 15-20 yards. We heard her snorting and running later as well, guessing it was just a flesh wound.

I've lost squirrels when I was younger and lost a dove this year I knocked the feathers off with a 22LR. Aimed for head and hit the body. Shot my gun a week later and found out it was shooting about 4" to the left.

i have a sort of different story to tell...

in approximately 1984, i was tagged out for deer in illinois first weekend, and chose to hunt pheasant on my father in laws place on saturday of the second weekend...

i had taken a rooster with a high angle shot and he landed dead near the peak of a small hill... as i bent to pick him up i noticed movement and blaze orange in the creek bottom on the other side of the hill..
it was the neighbors, and i walked down to say hi... they explained that they one of them had crippled a small buck that had run into the creek bottom... they asked me to help find him and finish him, and i agreed...

i was carrying no slugs of my own so one of them gave me 3 and i loaded up with them... they wanted to simply walk the creek bottom out, but i suggested that i swing out ahead and block the creek bottom further down where it joined a larger creek...
it took me the better part of a half hour to get into position, but i got set up and they began to work my way...

the oncoming guys were about 200 yards away still and i heard some horseweeds clatter fairly close to me... out jumps a forkhorn and i dropped him with no trouble...
almost at the sound of my shot, another small buck jumped out right in front of the 2 guys coming on towards me... one glance and i could see that this second buck was carrying a broken front leg... they got him.....

the guys involved were classy enough to use both of their tags and keep both deer... some guys would not have...
what i did was wrong, and could have gotten me into a fair bit of trouble...
i learned my lesson.....

I've posted this several times before. I've temporarily misplaced 2 moose I've shot. Long enough to defeat my purpose, which is meat in the freezer... which, with a moose, is generally just overnight, due to body mass/temperature/spoiling rate in my area/season, at least.

Shot a 40+ inch moose at @160 yards, offhand, standing, tight, arm-wrapped sling (no rest available) with a 180 gr .30-06 slug- probably Remington Corelokt. He spun 180 degrees with no evidence of hit and in two jumps was back into some of the nastiest old burn/second growth jungle I've ever tried to hunt thru. This was about 11:30 am, and we spent the rest of the day looking for him, up until an hour before dark (roughly 10 pm) looking for him. No blood or hair, but the sight picture on ignition had looked damned good. Finally we concluded i must have flat missed him.

10 days later, on my next trip in there (we were 5 miles off-road), I followed my nose to what was left of him - his hair, bones, antlers, and about 3" of squirming maggots. I was one step away from him before I could see him. From a chipped shoulder blade (bullet or bear?) and the original sight picture, I concluded my bullet had caught him a little high, and likely through one lung only. Still, he'd only gone about 150 yards, up onto this hillside back off the several moose trails we expected him to have followed (we lost his tracks in a welter of tracks after about 50 yards). The hillside was composed almost entirely of 8 foot high second growth birch one could barely force one's way through, with an almost impassible array of fallen, burned, big-timber spruce deadfalls from the fire 12 years before. He had run up the hillside, off-trail, and hid himself in a little 10' diameter circle of 8 to 10 foot high spruce trees- maybe 12 or 14 trees in all, with a moose length opening inside- I'm thinking they grew up around the perimeter of an old squirrel midden after the fire. At any rate, one could not see inside until stepping through the screen of branches.

That was 1982, and if I knew then, what I know now, about moose... but I'm still learning....so that's no excuse. Jack-straw deadfalls to 5 or 6 feet high all around this circle of spruce diverted me around it, both sides, on our first and the following two grid searches of the hillside. On my first pass, less than 10 minutes after the shot, I passed within 15 feet of the bull- and on the back track, maybe 25 feet on the uphill side. and twice more within about 30 feet. He was obviously already dead, or I'd have heard him on that first pass by...and that was the lone spruce patch on that whole hill-side...

The lesson here was that if the terraine is defeating you- that's probably where you should investigate - especially if there is an outstanding patch of cover- even 12 feet wide....

The other one was 4 or 5 years later- again a mid-40's bull, a not perfectly broadside shot, through a screen of brush, using my forked walking stick as a rest at about 60 yards, with a .338 Mag and 250 grain Nosler Partitions.

At the shot the bull bolted out of sight, followed by his cow, up and over a little 20 foot high ridge. We waited 10 minutes and followed, only to find the cow hanging out about 150 yards away. She would not leave, and we walked within 30 yards of her many times - sometimes within 30 feet, just knowing that bull was there somewhere within yards. 3 hours later, at dark, we had to give it up. The next weekend, by pure dumb luck I stumbled on the dead bull, less than 20 yards from where I'd shot him. Apparently this was again a poor one-lung hit, and he lived long enough that on our first follow up, he circled back to his original position to avoid us, which we simply did not search again," knowing" from his bolting sounds and that damned cow, that he was down over "that-a-way"! What really bothers me is that I thought I'd "almost heard a sound" back that way - and didn't investigate it...

And then, on one of my search patterns, IF I had taken 3 or 4 more steps down the main game-trail toward his original position-at-shot I'd have seen him at the base of the ridge, 20 yards away - no doubt down and dead at the time. Only 150 yards to the canoe, too...

Don't limit your search with dumb-chit assumptions...and if you thought you almost heard something- you probably did.

At this point in my moose hunting in this kind of cover, I gave up all quartering shots on moose. I no longer accept a double-lunger, either, if I have a choice (found those two bolters, but not without difficulty!. And trust me, following a blood trail after dark by flashlight in brown bear country is just no fun at all.) Head and CNS shots have worked 100% in this situation for me ever since. Still prefer the double lunger in more open country, especially at longer ranges and smaller animals.

And there was one memorable deliberate spine shot just forward of the pelvic girdle at @ 70 yards. He went straight down, of course, but I was still only two steps away from him before i could see his antlers, and another step closer to his butt before the finishing shot. (.338 - 250 gr.)

There was this bounding, spooked going all-out Dall ram full-curl I poked a shot at 30 plus years ago to no apparent effect (.270). Two hours later, my wife nailed a fine ram out of another group, over the ridge, at 35 yards, same gun, and our partner took the remaining full-curl at 50 yards as they ran through the saddle below him, a quarter mile away. (That's ONCE a plan of mine has worked to perfection in the last 40 years!!).

My brother came staggering into camp just before dark some hours later, with another full curl on his back, from where he was hunting on the other side of the mountain, two miles away. "Must be other hunters out here", he related shortly thereafter. "My ram has a bullet crease just through the skin at the back of the shoulder hump".

Last I saw of that ram he was still flying, a mile away, 1500 feet lower, crossing the valley headwaters, headed in Bill's direction.....

The wife and I are hoping to go back there this fall, after 32 years. This time, we ain't taking ANYONE else along on our honeymoon! Unless it's the boys.

1990, south of MacGregor MN... 250+ lb Whitetail..at least 7 points rack on one side alone...

last day of season... about 4:55 PM...

100 yds, 300 Win Mag, 200 grain Factory Federal Load with Sierra SP..chest shot..

deer went straight down on his nose at a dead run.. fur and blood in a circle greater than 24 inches...

buck jumped up and headed straight into the swamp he was headed before I hit him...

couldn't find that night...
stayed until next day and looked for him for close to 5 hours...

never found him in the swamp...

bullet too hard and velocity too fast for that close a shot, was the fault....so operator error...

[quoteIf I had a blood trailing Pyr, I'd teach him to retrieve so I wouldn't have to keep up with him. ] [/quote]

By law it has to be leashed so keeping up is no problem. It will drag you right on through the thickets. Sometimes I seem to be bleeding worse that the deer I'm after. I am 6'4" tall and 280 lbs. so I don't fit very well in some places and she gets eager when on a hot trail. We have a lot of briars and brambles in East Arkansas and I am usually down to my tee shirt before its over. On the bright side at 61 years old I probably don't have many more years of doing it. miles

In '06 I shot a nice little forkie with my .44 mag. I'd killed a boar with it in Texas that spring and was pretty confident.

Looking back I'm sure I hit him low and back, likely liver. He was REALLY close when I sent a 240 XTP his way... I think it was 23 grains of H110?

At any rate it went to the bottom of the hill in front of me, hit an old fence and did the "death blat" right in front of me. I radioed my brother-in-law to rub it in, milled around grabbing my gutting stuff from my backpack, grabbed a drink, and all of a sudden he took off with his flag down.

I tracked him all day but the conditions were terrible... never found him. Worst day of my hunting career for sure. Pick my shots a lot more carefully now and haven't taken that Redhawk hunting since, even though I know it wasn't the fault of the gun or ammo.

Several years ago near Pine River, Minnesota. I was set up on a spot where two trails crossed adjacent to a small clearing. The trail I was watching was heavily overgrown and a smoking hot deer trail. Forkhorn comes down the trail and steps into the opening offering an easy quartering shot at about 45 yards. The deer buckled at the shot from my 300 Savage (180 gr. Core-Lokt). I jacked another round into the gun as he gathered himself up and went across the intersection of the two trails. Second shot hit him on the run blowing off a golf ball sized chunk of hair and fat. I chased that deer for over 4 hours. Never did catch up to him. The trail was down to pin head sized spots of blood when I crossed into posted private property. The property owner came out and took up the trail, as I was exhausted from crawling through the thickest stuff that deer could find to run through. I hung out at his shed for about an hour-never heard a finishing shot, and started walking out. I stopped by the next day and he told me he never did catch up to him. Hard to believe I didn't anchor him with that first shot. 'Much as we'd like to think we can make a perfect shot every time, you just can't count on that. As for duck and goose hunting-steel shot just plain sucks. I know it's a necessary evil, but you'd better be dammned careful with your shots or you're going to cripple more birds than you take home. Geez, geese are hard enough to kill as it is, and this steel shot makes it even tougher. We only hunt over decoys (haven't been out in quite a while now) and it seems like you really want to try to catch them with their wings up and cupped and get the shot tucked up in under a wing if possible, or just try to break a wing and get them on the ground where you or the dog can finish the job.

I don't like dwelling on mine - but anyone who hasn't had it happen to them - hasn't hunted all that much.

Now that about sums it up,with perhaps a few fortunate exceptions. Chit happens.

Try not to let it....

Caliber, bullet, broadhead, etc.. ain't the area to be looking when trying to minimize loosing animals or SNAFU recovery problems.. I've learned a few things from my errors.. never let the string go on something iffy, a tricky moving target -- no matter how close. Never force a bullet through cover, no matter how little or few twigs, no matter how close and sure it seems, and never aim behind the shoulder on a bear.. aim dead-nuts into the middle of the shoulder.

All the stories show that if you do something long enough, anything that hasn`t happened yet, will.
I`ve lost deer with the bow and rifle. Pheasant too. I plan on hunting till I can`t, hopfully another 20 yrs. I`m sure I`ll have some problems along the way.

Shot a WT doe, standing 1/4'ing to me. Not exactly sure where the shot went, which is probably why I lost her. Lots of blood at the hit site, lots of blood for 2-250yds, then nothing.

No snow to follow. We did a grid search for several hours, and then agian the next day. Never found a thing, no coyotes, no wolves, no ravens, no trace that the deer was dead or alive.

It is still talked about in camp as to what happened to that deer.