Busting My Cherry: The Search Begins
After my badly hurt yet very determined to get away muley buck leaped out of his bed he took two bounds before he was out of sight just over a small ridge about thirty feet in front of us. Rather than make another mistake by following him and pushing him any harder than we already had, John thought it’d be best to lie there for a bit before we resumed our tracking. I’m not sure how long we laid there in the cold wet grass though it felt like hours. This was my deer, he was getting away. After John felt confident that my muley wasn’t running any more we slowly got up and glassed the area. The sun was completely up by now and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There are no trees on this particular sagebrush flat, and you could see for miles. If my deer was moving, we’d see him. He couldn’t really go anywhere fast in more than very short spurts, and when he walked he had a bad limp. You could have picked him up from a mile out. Only he wasn’t moving.
The three other deer he had come with were still hanging around and looking back as if they were waiting for their companion to spring up so they could finally get out of there, so we felt pretty confident that he was close by. We just had to find him. How hard could it be? He was a huge deer with a big rack, and we were in open country. But despite there being visibility for miles, there was more cover than a hurt deer could possibly hope for if he was going to have a chance at escaping alive. This flat not only had sagebrush; it was covered up with it. With the brush coming up at about waist high, it was the perfect place to bed down. His coloring matched the surrounding country, and his rack would blend in almost perfectly with the maze of tangled mess. His species had evolved over thousands of generations in this landscape, and though he was built to simply run away from predators using his trademark stott to hop over obstacles like sage with ease, he had also evolved to hide from predators in the event he couldn’t run. All he had to do was lay low.
Once we decided that he was still around, we gathered ourselves and came up with a plan to find him. He didn’t leave us any blood, or else it had all so quickly diluted in the morning dew that we couldn’t see it. He didn’t leave us anything behind to help us find him. We were on our own.
We started searching in a grid very slowly and methodically over an area of about 200 yards by 200 yards, walking ten yards apart. We went in one direction, then another, moving at the speed of a sloth and doing our best to look under every bit of sage. Nothing. Without any visual markers on the flats I quickly discovered how easily one can get disoriented, even over a relatively short distance. Walking a straight line proved to be tough, especially when the sage seemed to purposefully redirect you every few steps. It was short enough to see over with ease, but tall and thick enough to hide anything that was in it. We walked in every direction and used every search pattern we could imagine, ever widening our grids over the next six hours but came up with nothing. He had vanished. My first deer was gone, and we would never find him.
Even though we never did find my deer, I did learn a few things that would make me a better hunter. It would also teach me a valuable lesson: if you hunt long enough, you’re gonna eventually lose an animal, and you’ll have to deal with both sorrow for the animal knowing that you’ve made him suffer for no reason, and disappointment at not being able to get him. It just so happened that I learned this lesson much quicker than I had hoped. He was my first deer, one that I had worked hard to find, and I lost him. It was the kind of low that doesn’t go away quickly, especially after it was confirmed that you wont be able to shoot another one even if you found one,* and two years later I still think about that deer and how I could have done things differently. Did he survive being shot? Did he die from his wounds? Did predators get him due to his immobility?
Though I felt like I made a good shot, it obviously wasn’t good enough. Had I read the very excellent Finding Wounded Deer before I ventured on this trek, or done more research on proper shot placement rather than being preoccupied with the accuracy of my shooting, I would have likely aimed just a bit further back and slightly lower than I did. I hit where I had initially aimed, it’s just that where I had initially aimed wasn’t the right spot, at least not with the particular bullet I had chosen. My deer very obviously had a broken leg or shoulder, and I may well have hit one of his lungs in the process (though in retrospect his initial reaction to being hit wasn’t the common reaction to a single lung shot).** Deer are like humans: a single lung shot won’t necessarily result in the collapse of the uninjured one, and though it’s probable that he would still die, he might last a day or more before he succumbed to his injury. It’s also possible that I hit the dreaded black hole, a void in the chest cavity above the heart and lungs that results in nothing but a superficial wound, or that I shot him through the brisket, breaking his leg after exiting his body and leaving him with a bad injury, though not a fatal one. However he was injured he didn’t sustain one of the few wounds that will put a deer down quickly.***
The lack of a visible blood trail at any point during our search, despite there being lots of dew, also let me know that the bullet I had chosen just wasn’t good enough for the job. I did a pretty thorough search for ammo when I was getting ready for my trip, but again I was preoccupied with the accuracy of the bullet rather than about the terminal ballistics of the projectile once it hit my target. When I gave the antelope I shot later that day to the meat processor, he picked out a bullet fragment that was lodged just under the skin on the opposite side of where I had shot him. It was less than one quarter of the original size of the bullet meaning that it had fragmented all to hell on impact rather than holding together and progressing through the body as a single unit and creating as large a wound channel as possible. It had no chance of penetrating through, a necessity for creating trackable blood trails, and the most conducive kind of wound to encourage the animal to bleed out. As soon as Jessie handed me that bullet fragment I had a pretty clear idea of what happened after the same kind of bullet hit my deer earlier that day, a much larger and more substantial target that my antelope, and I vowed to never again skimp out on a hunting bullet. From now on, terminal ballistics would be my primary concern when looking for a new bullet. It’s not worth losing your game because you were too cheap to buy the highest quality hunting bullet available. It’s that simple. Bullets designed for great flight characteristics above all other concerns had a very small margin of error. Your shot has to essentially be perfect, and mine wasn’t. But now I knew better, and when I returned home I immediately went on a search to find a new bullet.
These lessons are tough ones to learn for a new hunter on his first hunt after shooting his first deer, and could very easily have sent me packing. But I was fortunate. I had another tag, and only a day and a half to find an antelope buck and get him on the ground. I didn’t have time to sulk, I had the most difficult part of the hunt still to come.
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* I had suspected that my chance to get a deer was gone, and John proactively let me know before I could ask. That moment was defeating, but I had other quarry to hunt and had to turn my mind to the antelope we had seen the day before, but couldn’t stalk due to the horrible storm and the only approach being a stream bed.
** According to Finding Wounded Deer, the typical reaction to a one-lung shot deer is a quick bolt for 100 yards or so where he’ll likely slow down and try and find a place to bed down. This deer trotted about fifty or seventy-five yards, then proceeded to walk a one quarter of a mile, then up a hill before bedding.
*** The wounds that will kill a deer quickly and efficiently are a double lung shot, a heart shot, a kidney shot, a head shot, or a lucky hit of one of the major arteries. There are definitely other injuries that will kill a deer with one hundred percent certainty, such as a liver or gut shot, but many of those wounds take hours to finally cause death and the deer could put a lot of ground in between where he was shot and where he will die making tracking him a daunting prospect.