Ep. 29: An Impossible Blood Trail and Essential Skills After the Shot

You've stalked in with your bow on a great mule dear buck, drew back, picked a spot and let the arrow fly. Your arrow connected? What do you do? How do you proceed? Last week we talked about shot placement. This week, I want to cover everything after the shot, including how to interpret that hit and how to track and approach it down to animal, as well as some standard weight times for different shots. But first I want to share what I consider the craziest track job I've

ever done. It happened on a late season archery hunt for mule deer in Montana. This particular hunt in Montana was late season, during the rut, cold, in a very low density unit. So what did I decide to do during the general rifle season, I decided to go out and hunt with my bow. Now, that might not make sense to most people, and it sometimes doesn't even make sense to me, but I love the added challenge of it, and I love chasing mule deer with my bow. So

I figured, look, I know this area really well. I decided to take a week off from guiding and just focus on hunting deer. And I thought, I've got a few things working for me. It's the rut. There's probably not very many people out there chasing him right now. And I thought, well, if I'm gonna be out hunting anyways, it'd be cool to try to get a deer with my bow. Now. If that doesn't sound challenging enough, I also don't know why I did it. Decided to film

the whole thing solo. So a lot of things working against me, but a few things working for me, the rut factor and the knowledge of the area. I really felt like I could be successful. So I started out hunting. Started out looking in some places that I hadn't got a chance to hunt for a long time, but knew that I'd found bucks there in the past and was

turning up very, very very few deer. The temperatures dropped a couple of the days it was below zero, and then it started to warm up around twenty degrees fahrenheit. After about three days of not seeing well seeing one dear not seeing much um, I continued to just check different spots and go to different places. I ended up finding a pocket of does and a good buck in one can and that I knew had a little bit higher deer densities for the unit compared to some of

the other places that I was checking out. So I decided, well, I'm gonna keep hunting this spot until I find the buck that I want because there's does here, it's low density, so I'm expecting that those does will start to attract bucks as the rep kicks off, and I'll keep going

back to that spot in checking. Trouble with it is it's not really great glassing country because it's fairly heavily timbered, but is good for still hunting where I could just kind of sneak along through old logging roads they have no driving access, and then work ridges and other things into betting areas and areas where I figured there might be better concentrations of does, maybe drawing some of these bucks out of the bigger mountains for the rut. Well,

it paid off. It worked. I found a giant buck, a buck that I would have been happy shooting with a rifle buck that I've been happy shooting in a trophy area or one of the top units in the state. And I just so happened to stumble on this buck with my bow in my hand. And when I spotted him, I was first looking at this group of does, and he came out of the timber and he was pretty close within range. He ended up pushing a dough away. I got in, made my stock, snuck up there, drew back.

Everything looked great. You kind of turned and looked at me as I drew back, but I knew his attention was more on the does and that little bit of movement. There was actually quite a few doughs around me. So you know, whether he pegged me and thought, oh that's a danger or not, it was too late. At this point. The arrow was on his way. The shot looked good. The buck was kind of up on a ridge and he ran off and over and down. He did like a buck, you know, like bucked his back legs up

and ran ran away. And I thought to myself, sweet, that was a perfect shot. Everything looked perfect about it, the way the buck acted where I thought I saw the arrow hit his body position, everything looked really good. So in that scenario, you know, normally with a bow shot, if let's say the best shot kind of talks about it before, but like a double lung shot. But maybe that deer would expire within fifteen minutes at the most. So it was in the evening time. I didn't want

it to get too late. I figured, oh, that deer has got to be piled up, so I gave it standard maybe fifteen minutes or so. I started walking up found the blood. Looked around from my araw, but thought, well, maybe it's sailed through. Um I might not find it right here, but I had a great blood trail analyze. The blood had like bubbles in it, so I knew, okay, it was a lung shot. Perfect. This deer should just

be piled up. Followed a trail. There was some snow and then some dry, but this trail was super easy to follow. Followed it to the first spot and there was a bed. I thought, while I'm following the trail, the winds at my back I thought, well, maybe he just fell over here, and then got up ran a little ways, and then I found a piece of the air, like the back half of the air broken off, so I knew the air was still in him. Must have hit the opposite shoulder on the other side, broken off. Whatever.

But I decided, well, before it gets too dark, I'm just gonna keep following this budget. He should just be within twenty yards if you're followed a little ways, and it started kind of going uphill. At that point, I thought, that's really strange. But oh man, you know it's not necessarily uphill, just more level. So I thought, well, he's got to be right in this canyon. Followed it for maybe thirty to fifty more yards, and there was another

bed in this snow. Okay, this is weird. I mean, it wasn't making any sense to me, so I decided maybe I just pushed this buck out of his second bed. This isn't good. So I decided to wait a little bit longer, and then right before dark, followed it from that second bed, and figure should be expired by now for sure. Followed that second bed and the tracks started going uphill, but it was still bleeding at that point I said, Okay, this is stupid. I need to pull

out of here and come back in the morning. So, after not sleeping very well that night, watching the video, just trying to analyze that everything still looked good, I decided, all right, I mean, there's no reason I shouldn't find this deer. I go back the next day and pick up tracking where I left off. Luckily, it did snow a little bit, but it was just a light snow, and I could still see the blood and the tracks. It was like not even a just a light dusting,

so everything was fine. The strange thing was is I could see where the deer bedded, and then he ran up and bedded again, and I followed those tracks, and he ran and bedded again, and there was blood this entire way until he got to the top, and in the beds there would be blood, but I'd be following the tracks in the snow, then there'd be dry spots, and then I'd catch tracks again in the snow. Then the tracks led to a another group of deer, and

there was just tracks everywhere. So everywhere that I found a bed, I found blood. But at this point now I lost the blood on the tracks, so now I'm assuming in my head, I'm like, okay, well, maybe the buck I've I've seen it happen before where the bucks so rutted up. It didn't really know it was hit. They're fighting their their testosterone levels are just super high. Maybe he got on a hot dough track and then just kind of started following this dough and I don't

know why he didn't bleed out. Maybe the hit wasn't where I thought. I definitely was sure that I hit it in the lungs, So I don't know what's going on at this point. There's tracks going everywhere. I'm most of the way up the mountain now, and I'm like, okay, now, I don't know which tracks to follow. So I pick one set of tracks, follow those tracks out for a mile or whatever, come back, find another set of tracks. Follow those tracks, and there's like thirty deer tracks here.

I tried to base him off of the size of the tracks and his gate, but there was other buck tracks in there. There was just a mess of deer tracks. There's some snow, there was some no snow. It just got really difficult to track what I thought would be walking up on this buck ended up now it's midday. I'm like thinking, I'm never going to find this dear and racking in my brand. What could have happened? I'm

like thinking about, Okay, I just can't give up. Just follow every set of tracks i'd actually recorded on my phone. How many I was. There's a lot of miles logged going back and forth, just walking around finding different sets

of tracks, trying to find blood. I actually found a set of tracks and there was some blood in around the tracks, and that got me on a detour for a while until I could find a good print where I could see that it wasn't obstructed and it turned out to be a dough So that deear just happened to have whatever scraped itself on a stick or who knows what another deer, just a couple of drops of blood.

That kind of took me on a d tour. I get back to the bait, back to where I last tracked the buck for sure, and then followed another set in a different direction. Sure enough, long story short, I end up finding the buck. Now you're probably like, well, what happened? So after analyzing what had happened, the shot looked good. Now, after I analyzed what went on. This is the crazy part because I've never seen this happen

and this is not standard. Now why am I telling this story about this deer on a recovery podcast, Because I think a lot of recovery you have to play it a certain way. And I did a few things wrong in the initial setup, and then there's just bad luck. So here's the bad luck. What had happened as I shot, the deer kind of started to quarter away. Now, if I would have shot a little bit further back, it would have been a problem. I probably would have gone

through both lungs. What ended up happening was the arrow hit one lung and then somehow pinned into the front shoulder on the opposite side at the first bed. Either the deer pulled it out or something. The arrow had come out just part of the arrow, And when I found the dear dead, he had part of his lung actually outside of the cavity, which plugged the hole. So by plugging the entrance hole, it didn't allow the lungs

to collapse and then closed off the wound. That's why I stopped getting blood, but would get blood in the bed. So up until the first point, it was a blood trail. Like every other blood trail, I followed where the deer

should be gone expired immediately, this dear. Somehow it's lung pulled out and closed the wound off, not allowing the lungs to collapse and not allowing it to bleed out, in which case then it probably got on other deer tracks, continued to rut, and then made its way miles away from where it started until things got messed up again.

So I ended up actually finding the deer, but only because I just didn't give up, because I knew what I saw with the shot, and I knew from the initial tracking and having tracked enough, Dear, that that deer was going to be dead. Now, if there wasn't snow, I doubt that I ever would have found that deer. It would have been going through my head what happened? Why did I lose that dear? This doesn't make any

sense now, is luck and persistence would have it? I ended up continuing to search because I knew what I saw and ended up recovering that dear. How you proceed after that arrow or bullet is released and impacts the

animal can greatly affect your successive recovery. Now I want to cover a few things that I think are just imperative, including the first moves you make after making that shot, and then we'll go into a little bit of how to interpret the hit, what some of the signs on the ground, then as far as what different things to look for in the blood trail as well as on your arrow, and then just some tips on how to

track and a few different scenarios. And then after that maybe we'll we'll kind of talk about some weight times and how to best proceed to make sure that you recover that animal. The first thing I do after I make that shot, and this is a very important and often overlooked step, is I mark where I shot from. I also take a mental note of where the animal was standing. I'll tell myself something about specific of where it was, or I'll pull out my camera and take

a picture. If you've got your phone in your pocket, take a picture of where the animal is standing, because you're gonna probably reference that spot multiple times. I also remember the yardage at which the animal was, so I'll mark where I'm standing, whether it's pull something on my pocket and tie it off, take a spare arrow and

stick it in the ground. I'm gonna mark where I'm standing now out when I'm bow hunting, even if I know I made a perfect shot, thirty minutes is my normal weight time, so I just give it time to calm down, stay quiet, don't proceed right away, just mark where I'm at and wait. There's a lot of reasons for that, but I think that thirty minutes with a perfect shot is a good just Yeah, might expire ten or fifteen minutes, whatever, but give yourself a little bit

extra time. Even some guys go forty five minutes, but it just depends on a lot of factors. But I always generally go thirty minutes at the minimum. Then I'll mark where I'm at, and I'll range where the animal was and then make some mental notes of where that animals. Do that while you're waiting, even before I go look

for my arrow or whatever. The reason for that is because once you get to the spot where you're gonna be looking for your arrow, for blood, for tracks, you can range back and figure out where you were and kind of triangulate your position to get exactly where that animal is standing. The next step is now going to be look for sign. Now you should have a good

indication of where you hit whatever you're shooting at. But with as fast as bows are now, or maybe your rifle hunting and you're by yourself or you don't have someone watching, it can be fairly hard to tell. Maybe where you hit you might not have seen your arrow in flight, it might have been too fast, maybe the lighting was weird. A lot of places you can use light up knocks now on your arrows, which are great,

but some states still don't allow it. And if you've got a fast bow, yeah, you probably aren't gonna see where your arrow hits. So what you're gonna base most of the intail on and when you're gonna make your move is going to be all based on how that animal reacted at the shot. So a perfect shot would be say lungs or heart. I find that most time when they're shot like that, it's just a neck out straight run, full speed away. A lot of people say, like if it if he gets heart shot, they buck.

That is true. I've seen him do that though on other shots as well, Like if they get hit in the leg, that sometimes happens, but for the most part heart shot, they'll buck or kick and then run full speed.

If you shoot a little bit further back. Something like hunching up from the back might indicate that you hit too far back, maybe in the intestines, maybe in the liver, or then anything that involves favoring aside, like um favoring a leg or some kind of weird reaction that way might mean hitting it in the leg, breaking a shoulder. Those kind of body signals will be your first indication of where did you hit that animal. So if you know, shoot it looked like I hit it back, now you're

gonna want to wait longer. So let's first talk about the weight times in tracking and knowing where you hit. If I shoot something perfect like I said thirty minutes, now, if you if your rifle hunting and you watch it drop, or your bow hunting you watch it run over and fall over day, that's completely different. This is just if you shoot it runs off and you don't really know,

especially with the bow. With a rifle, it might be different because you might, depending on the terrain, you might be able to get a follow up shot, especially if it just ran over. Rise it's open country, get over there fast and look for it and make sure it's not running out or or give yourself a good idea where it's going. But we're just gonna narrow this down

to bow hunting. Right now, if you think that you have made a perfect shot, thirty minutes is my standard weight time for shots that I know, okay, I should just walk over there and be piled up within twenty yards. Now, if you're talking you think you maybe hit it in the liver or made not as good as a shot, I would give it two to three hours on liver shots, and then anything further back from the liver that's six

to twelve hours in my opinion. And then you've got shots that are look good in our muscle shots, and that might if you know you hit it in a muscle, the recovery on that may not be fatal, but it might be where you could restock and re find that animal. So sometimes on that in those particular instances, I would error on the side of tracking sooner rather than later, or at least getting to a point where I can start looking for it and then give it some time

to bed down, but not get too far ahead. Start. So we've marked where we shot from and we know that, okay, it looked like a good hit. So now We're gonna go to where the animal was and inspect the ground, inspect the arrow. Hopefully we can find it, and then proceed from there as well, so to confirm what we think we already know based on how the animal reacted from the shot. If you can find your arrow, that's

a great sign of where you made your hit. Now, a few things to think about when you pick up your arrow. Here's what you're looking for. Well, if it's gritty and bloody, that's probably It depends on the position of the animal and how good that shot. If it was quartering away hard, it's gritty and then some real dark blood, well you probably maybe hit of the intestine, but you probably got the liver and the lungs as well,

depending on how hard it was quartering away. If it just has bile and green material, not a lot of blood, then you hit it way further back, maybe in the colon or whatever. Now, if it's just good solid blood like red blood, could be heart, it could be lungs. And then if you get a little bit more lighter colored blood, that's probably lungs. More like pinkish colored blood. I always tend to see on lung shots. So if

you can't find your arrow. Now we're just gonna have to look at the ground and what bloods they're What color is the blood? Real dark blood often indicates liver. It's almost more like a it's a really dark purple, almost like purple black color. A lighter color indicates lungs, especially if there's bubbles in it, because that oxygen in the lungs makes it a little bit lighter colored. It's more of a pink color. And then heart blood is more just pure red. But also you've got to realize too,

muscle shots can be that pure red as well. So I think a lot of people mistake a muscle hit for heart or something else. But for the most part, lungs or lighter color, liver is that darker color. Once you've identified okay, where was this animal hit and verified whether your assumption is right through indications in the sign on the arrow and the sign on the ground through the blood, now time to decide. Okay, Now do I

start tracking now or do I wait even longer? If you know it's a good shot, you're like, Okay, everything looked good. The signs are there. I've got light colored blood, some a little bit of a bubbly blood. There's a pretty decent blood trail. Let's follow it up right now. Now.

If you think I got maybe hit the liver or even further back, now you've got to go back to those standard weight times and just be patient, because what you don't want to do is you don't want the animal to get pushed out of its bed, because what that's gonna do is gonna keep pushing the deer or whatever further and further away and leave you smaller and smaller blood rails to follow, and you're gonna be less

likely to recover that animal. Now, if it just goes to one spot, runs within a hundred or so yards, and beds down, and then expires, you have a really good chance of finding that animal. Now, let's get into how to track. If you know it's a fatal hit, then you're just gonna follow the blood trail. The blood

trail will lead to that animal. So many people get ahead of themselves, they start looking too fast and too frantic, and they destroy the sign and the blood trail itself and the tracks and everything while just kind of looking around randomly. So I always like to find the blood and then go from there because I know it's it's a good trail, it should lead me to the animal, and they can, even on good shots, be very difficult

to find sometimes. So what I do is I find the tracks, find where the animal was, and then depending on which side it was the hit was on, or if you think, if you know you've gotta pass through, maybe we'll see it on both sides, I start looking very carefully on all the brush around on those tracks. Then what I'll do is will stay on the tracks and then confirm that I'm on its tracks by finding blood.

As I go and find blood, I markt whether it's with like a dropping a pin on on X or I used to use toilet paper a lot, or some flagging that will come back and get I'll mark where the blood is because there's a lot of times where you will get off the trail, you'll start following something else that might not be that dear, and you don't realize, okay, I gotta go back to the last blood I saw

and then follow that. That is how you trail an animal. Now, the practice of it, especially on great shots, that's why you make a great shot, because you don't have to blood trail something that's difficult. Most of the time, it's like a highway leading to it. It's very clear, and the animals right there within twenty or thirty yards of

where you've shot. But it's those ones where maybe something weird happens, maybe you made a shot that the animal reacted funny, you you hit in the wrong, whatever stuff happens, but you should still be able to find whatever you hit because there should be some form of trail tracks blood to that animal. The key is really being patient and really staying on and marking and then going back

and trying to find the trail. Now, once you lose the trail, what I do is I grid out from there looking for anything, any kind of sign, track, whatever. What I will also do is pay close attention to the tracks of that animal when it's running. How do those tracks look, what's the size of them. There's times where I've even taken a stick and measured between the tracks.

So if it gets into multiple tracks running different directions, you can sometimes tell the difference between two deer if it's not a good print based on its stride, where it might have got into a dough that's a shorter body, shorter stride, and this one's a little bit longer stride than the other one, or match those strides up. Now, there are tracking jobs where you have made a shot that hit a muscle, hit something non vital, or something that you know might take a while. How I proceed

always depends on a few things. So I've got my standard weight times, but there are exceptions for that. So if I shoot something in the evening and I know, well, it looked like a good shot, but now there's not a lot of predators around here, there's no chance of rain or snow tonight, most of the time I would just leave it till the morning if it's cool out, because there's no loss of meat, and you know you aren't going to push it in the dark. If you shoot it in the morning, you know you might try

to wait till afternoon. Now, if it's real hot, if it's a lot of predators in your area, if it's gonna snow or rain, you may have to push those times that you would normally wait a little bit quicker.

And the reason you do that is because you know that if you leave it, there's a very low likelihood of finding it the next day, where you might have a better chance of getting another shot, spotting and where it's at, and then waiting or some other form of kind of continuing to hunt for that animal and then hope to find it bedded still or maybe see it moving because you know that if you wait, you aren't going to find it, and those kind of things. You know,

everything situational when it comes to hunting. But there are sometimes where it's more ethical to track earlier. But most of the time it's more ethical to wait just because you won't push it. I think that that makes a lot of sense in the moment, but it's something that I just have to talk about because there is no clear cut this is how long you wait every time. I've been places where if you leave a deer overnight, it will be completely eaten by coyotes in the morning.

And there's a lot of places like that. Or there's places where you shot something and it's gonna rain now. If I am hunting and I know that it's getting toward the end of light, you know, sometimes you just have to think, Okay, if it's a marginal shot, if you don't have a great shot, wait, if you know it's raining, or it's it's currently raining, it's currently snowing and you've got a shot that's like, I gotta make a quick shot, and it might not be that great.

Don't shoot, because your odds of recovering that animal go down drastically if you are tracking an animal, say you're tracking an animal that might not be hit that great. Maybe you think it's hitting the liver, maybe it's hit a little bit further back, or maybe you think you might have hit it in a muscle. You aren't sure, but it doesn't look like it's going to be immediately fatal,

and you have to track early. The best thing is to have two people tracking, so one person staying on the blood, the other person out using the wind and kind of hunting and looking for that animal simultaneously. So someone's following the blood while the other person is looking

ahead for the deer. Because if you're constantly looking down at the ground, tracking and you know there might be a chance that might be betted and gonna jump up again, you're probably gonna miss it if you're looking at the ground, analyzing sign and following a blood trail. So the best

thing to do is to get another person. One person follow the blood because that's going to lead to where the animal is, and then you with your weapon ready or your your bow or your shotgun or whatever you're hunting with, ready to continue sneaking forward and kind of hunting for that animal, visually looking and following the best assumed direction that the animal went. Really the last thing that I would want to touch on for recovery of an animal. And this goes for whether you're rifle hunting

or bow hunting. It doesn't matter. I see this happen a lot. Is the way that people walk up on a downed animal. Now, if you know that it it's down dead, completely awesome, great, it doesn't really matter as much. But especially with rifle shots, I've seen so many times people shoot something with a rifle. It might be spined or they hit it high and it just drops. Animals that just drop are generally the ones that get away because they wake up, they roll over, they run off,

they don't leave a lot of blood. So the way that I approach an animal is I always approach with the wind in my face, very very carefully. I try to position my body to where its head can't see me, and that way I can get up close enough to make sure that it's expired. I Also if it's wounded or had been previously wounded and down and there's a hill, I will always come in from the bottom, as opposed

to at the top from above it. So I come in from below it because that way, if it is seriously injured, it's gonna be harder for it to run uphill, so it'll get up and give you a lot more opportunity to shoot again. Or as if it's running downhill, it might run downhill fast, out of sight quickly and not give you an opportunity for a follow up shot. I just wanted to really throw out a few. It's just like a lot of tips on following up game animals.

Most of them are going to be used when something is hit poorly, and that should not be very often because you're gonna listen to the last podcast and do everything in your power to make a clean, ethical kill. But there are times where things don't work right. Something happens, maybe you make a bad shot, maybe the animal jumps or arrow hits a stick on flight you just don't know, or something crazy happens, like in the Meal of Dear Story, I told where everything should have been good, but it

looked like a good shot. You did the best you could with what you thought you were aiming at, and you end up hitting one lung randomly and the animal goes a lot further than you think. So just keep in mind that there are ways to increase your chance of finding an animal that's hit poorly. A lot of it comes down to the time you wait and how you interpret the sign that you see at the shot, at the blood trail, and the way that animal reacts.

There is a art to tracking, and you get better at it with time and with practice, is just like anything else. I was actually very fortunate to have some experience going with some bushmen in Africa that were just trackers.

I mean, hundreds of generations of people that could track, and their skills and abilities and the things that they picked up on was just uncanny, and I really tried to kind of take that into my own way of ciphering tracks and following up on animals and just understanding animals by watching them and their behaviors and a lot of the things that they do they probably can't explain to someone else how they do it. Because I found over the years, I've gotten so much better at finding

and recovering animals. For people. As a guide, you get a lot of experience maybe recovering something that wasn't shot that great. You know, not because it's something you did, but maybe the person shooting got way too excited and things happen. I mean, it's it's it's the truth of it. Now, we do everything in our power so those things don't happen, but when they do, the way that you react and the things that you do right after the shot can

make the difference. Things like marking where you're at, interpreting the shot, and interpreting the sign. All that stuff is just going to be key to actually making a good recovery. So that's just something to think about when you're out there. When you have an opportunity to follow up and and track something, even if you saw something just fall over, don't miss an opportunity just because you know it's dead

or you made a great shot. Don't miss an opportunity to go to where the animal was shot, look at the tracks, interpret how did it jump, where did it go, what's the blood look like, even on something that's fatally shot, on whatever, Take every opportunity you can in the field to learn and get better at it. I really appreciate

everybody listening as always if you get a chance. I looked through a couple of days ago, and there are some incredible comments, some great comments from everybody out there about the podcast, things that they liked, and some really good ratings, and I just really really appreciate that. Like I kind of forgot to read some of them, all right, I haven't read them in a while, and I went back and I'm like, wow, that's the reason that I'm

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