How often has anything like this happend to you?

[huntwriter]

brotherjack- it is a fluke, the worst thing that can happen now is that you get disdiscuraged and end up loosing your confidence. In hunting and especially in bowhunting, after all is said and done it is confidence in you and your equipment that will make you suceesful.
Now before someone gets hung up on this, read again, (after all is said and done). Meaning, you practiced the weapon of your choice, you know where to shot and you did scout.

Usually any shot in the goody box (chest) will kill an animal, double lung, single lung and heart. These are the preferred killing shots. The undesirable but still killing shots are, liver, bounch (stomach) and even the hindleg and of course the spine, which I conceder a lucky shot.

The problem is that a deer shot with a bow does not die of shock but of blood loss. If the blood loss is not rapid it can travel quite far, one reason why I never let an animal rest and thus bleed slowely (animals blood has the ability to instant clogging) I push them and keep their hearts pounding and pumping blood out. After the shot I am within minutes after them quietly stalking them. If I see them still alive I try to get another shot off. If they see me and run good too the more it runs the faster it will bleed and I watch it and hear where it runs and keep following quietly. Never lost a deer since I do that, an old trick I learned in Tennessee where the leave litter can be a foot high and a search on hand and knees brings your nose only inches away from rattle snakes .

Mortally injured animals seek a place to hide, instictievly they know that they are very vulnerable, they seek out the thikest brush to hinde in. You will be surpriced how little a deer needs to completly vanish from sight. I once recovered a buck in a clump of high grass not much bigger than the dog house in my back yard.

Someone here mentiond something about cross bows. It really does not matter what weapon you use to hunt with. Rifle, Muzzleloader, Slug Gun, Crossbow, Traditional Bow or Compound Bow, I hunt with all of these and they are all accurate killing machines. What's important is to know the limitations of each weapon and your limitations. If you are capable to shoot each arrow in the bulls eye at 50 yards on the range then that does not mean you will be able to do that under hunting conditions maybe 25 to 30 yards.

Someone else mentions treestand height. The higher you hang a treestand the more critical shot placement will become. If your stand hangs 30 ft of the ground then the actual target becomes very small plus there will be a lot of bone to get trough. Also the shot will be streight down, meaning the arrow will enter high and exit under the animals belly, if you get an exit wound. The exit wound will clog up with organs preventing blood from comming out. The cavity of the animal will have to fill up with blood to exit trough the entry hole but no animal has that much blood. No blodd trail! If the deer stands only 20 yards from your stand and your stand is 30 feet up a tree the actual distance is not 20 yards but 35 yards the arrow has to travel. in all my years I have never found any need to hang a stand higher than between 12 and 20 feet of the ground and in America I hunted some pretty spooky and nervous deer on heavily hunted public land where even during bow season every other tree has a hunter sitting in it, go figure. More important than stand height is background cover, the higher you climb the more likely you are sky lighted deer will see you from far away and wont come any closer to investigate that dark blob on the tree. Same with scent control, some hunters say the higher you climb the less likely deer will smell you. That is why for me every hunting trip begins with a shower and a set of fresh clothing I do not worri about scent I worry about the wind and it makes no difference if the deer can smell you 50 or 200 yards away, again, they will not come closer to investigate.

This has become an unusual long post but I want to make sure you understand that these things can and will happen to all of us. If you hunt long enough it will happen, it is not a pleasant feeling but it happens and you carry on that is life and has nothing to do with "ethics" or "morals" it's nature and as my wife pointendly says it. "Nature dosen't give a dam."

[Sikanni Stalker]

exact same thing happened to me the first time I ever drew on an animal. It was a blacktail not far from my home. shot it, it was a good shot , so i thought, could see the blood coming out of him, I walked up to the impact spot a little to soon, to see him leaning against the fence looking at me, he bolted. I recover my arrow and it was red up to the fletching and there was lots of blood and bubbles, I figured it was a good hit and since I had already spooked him I went back to the house to grab the dog and see if she could track woth a darn and give the deer time to die. Blood trail was great at first, saw a few places the buck laid down and blood pooled, but we went a long ways up[ hills through trees and brush and the trail was getting pretty thin. If it wasn't for the dog I would have lost the trail a couple times, anyways long story short I didn't recover that animal, I cut my tag anyway and damn near gave up the bow. I am glad I didn't I just worked harder at it and realized even though I was a good shot I could still make a mistake. For me the bottom line was the shot wasn't good enough, it looked like a kill shot, but like cappy said it may have been rerouted due to deflection on bone or somthing. I have never lost another since and have had quite a few kills with the bow from grouse to geese to deer and bear.I remeber reading a post a few years back about blood color/bubbles, flesh etc. describing the type of blood you see in relation to what organs get hit etc. Lungs=bubbly and dark, liver= bright, if any one remembers this maybe post a link it's a good one.

[Ddog]

i am a semi- seasoned bow hunter and i say that beacuase i dont really know what seasoned is, i have only taken 1 animal with a gun and over 40 with a bow including 35 deer 1 elk 2 bears coyotes and the list goes on, one thing i am very dissapointed in is the amount of hunters picking up crossbows and taking to the bush to hunt.i have lost a few deer and it was my own fault. and i know that 2 of those deer lived because i seen them later in the season. your problem with not recovering your animal was simply a matter of shot placement, yes a quartering away shot is a good shot to take the problem was the arrow was probably put to far forward, missing the vitals. the farthest deer i had travel on me was about 100yards and i wouldn't of believed it if it wasnt my own because it was a double lung shot on a 6x5 whitetail at about 8 yards.
i am sorry to hear that your wifes deer wasnt at the end of the blood trail but it was hopefully only a wound. a slightly quartering away shot should be hit slightly by the back of where you think the lung would be thus penetrating hopefully hitting the close lung but should be hitting the second lung full on. every other animal i have hit in one lung has gone less than 100 yards. i have dropped 3 deer to date from my treestand hitting them almost straight down throught the spine and into the heart.
In response to your question NO it is not common , yes it is common to track your animal but not to lose them with good shot placement.
one of my favorite things is tracking after a good shot.
have you given up on looking?

[Onesock]

Does your wife have total confidence in her ability to shoot her bow? How much does she practice? Has she ever gone to a
3D shoot to practise judging distance? Big differance in shooting at ordinary targets than shooting at 3D targets.

[brotherjack]

one thing i am very dissapointed in is the amount of hunters picking up crossbows and taking to the bush to hunt.

your problem with not recovering your animal was simply a matter of shot placement

i am sorry to hear that your wifes deer wasnt at the end of the blood trail but it was hopefully only a wound.

have you given up on looking?

Considering that this post was months ago, yeah, we've given up officially. We looked and looked, and later took to driving by and glassing and listening for crows. Nada...

I would have to agree 100%, since we didn't recover the deer (and since it ran a LONG ways, up steep terrain, etc), the shot definitely didn't go where it needed to be - though my wife knows well enough where to put an arrow or bullet that I/we would assume that her aim was off or something went wrong with the shot technicly speaking (maybe a twig or blade of grass the arrow clipped, or possibly even a bad draw of the crossbow, or she let the limbs get off-level in her excitement, or something... I wasn't physically present at the time of the shot, so I don't know anything other than what she told me).

And lastly, I somewhat resent the whole "dissappointment" with me being a crossbow hunter. I've become really rather disgusted with a reasonable percentage of the bowhunting community over this whole issue, as a lot of people seem to instantly assume that since I hunt with a crossbow, I'm somehow lacking any ethics or morals that they would respect. I'm not saying that that's your attitude, as you haven't said as much, so if I'm off base, forgive me - but your comment brings to mind a lot of the abuse I've taken and/or witnessed from bowhunters over the issue.

For the record (and as a reply to more posts than just yours, from this thread and others): since we purchased our crossbow back in the summer, my wife and I have practiced with it until we've worn the serving out 4 times, and it's almost ready to be re-served again as I write this. I haven't counted how many shots, but it takes a LOT of shooting to wear out the serving on a crossbow. We practice with a broadhead, a single arrow (to simulate the 'one and only shot you get' in the field), and walking random distances from the target between each shot after the walk up to retrieve the arrow. In the field, we don't take shots over 25-ish yards, we don't take anything but perfect broadside or slightly quartering away shots, and I don't personally know anyone who has (or would) work as hard as we have to recover an animal after a bad hit (but I know a bunch of guys who have told me "man, I wouldn't spend that much time looking... if you find it after all this time, it'll just be a waste of your tag..." and the like). I make no claims that we are the most experienced hunters you ever met (3 years for me, 2 for my wife), and I won't claim I've never made a bad judgement call, but we work our butts of to do the very best we can possibly do on all fronts. If there's anything we could do better, then by all means speak up - I'd be happy to know it.

[PGKris]

I think what happens is that when the animal lays down, the blood pools and clots the wound. That's why you never found any blood. Happened to a guy I know. It's tough luck. I don't think she hit a lung, even with bubbles in the blood because I don't think any lung shot deer can go for more than a kilometer, especially up the hill you described. Better luck on the next one.
KRIS

(PS: You'll never catch any flak from this bowhunter! It's like the fly fishermen that hate the gear chuckers! Get over it! We're all in the together!)

[Fred]

You won't get any static from me either BJ. On a slightly different note, that serving? My Barnett has a loose serving and under a glass it looked like it had been cut. I ran my finger carefully along the runners that the serving rides on and found a very tiny burr where something contacted the runner. That has resulted in a premature serving failure. Have you checked yours? Fred

[Driftwood]

I have been told by people older and much wiser than myself, that an animal that is hit hard will go down hill. If this is true, and your Deer went up hill, I would say that your shot was not a "kill" shot.

Sorry that you didn't find your deer, but good on you for being diligent in your search for it.

Perhaps a Bear or Cougar snatched it on you. I have heard of that happening.

[brotherjack]

Perhaps a Bear or Cougar snatched it on you. I have heard of that happening.

The more I've replayed the whole incident in my mind, the more I've thought that maybe something like that happened. The last spot the animal laid down was a thick, deep blood pool, that was basically dry when we found it. So my logical assumption is that the animal bolted and ran over a kilometer, went up the steep hill, and laid down all within minutes of being shot. We didn't find that spot where it laid down until many hours later, so if a cougar or grizz came along and picked it off and headed back into the bush with it, it would explain everything...

Or even if there was just a predator of some kind near there to spook and chase the deer after the wound congealed and the blood flow stopped, it might have run another kilometer or two through pine-needle covered forrest floor that doesn't hold tracks, which would again explain what we saw...

Anyway... no way to know, but it's hard to stop thinking about it too...

[brotherjack]

that serving? My Barnett has a loose serving and under a glass it looked like it had been cut. I ran my finger carefully along the runners that the serving rides on and found a very tiny burr where something contacted the runner. That has resulted in a premature serving failure. Have you checked yours? Fred

I think a bit of the issue with the serving on mine, is that the rails aren't aluminum or steel - they're this pressed composite plastic-like stuff. There aren't any sharp edges or anything, but it's not smooth as glass like the bows I've seen with metal rails, and I think the surface has a slight sandpaper effect on the serving that causes them to wear out fairly regularly.

Though as I said, I shoot a LOT to wear one out. Just to put a wild guess to it based on how often I practice and how much I usually shoot in a practice, I'd say I got about 1,000 shots out of the factory serving, and I get maybe 750 out of one that I've wound myself. For a $129.99 crossbow, I think that's pretty good.