The picture is from the internet but it looks the same.
We did well and luckily his rifle (and him) can shoot, it made a three shoot one hole group with Federal factory ammo. I also sighted in Andreas 243 and 270 as well as doing load testing on my 270 WSM with some handloads using Nosler Ballistic Silvertip Combined technology bullets with three different powders. I found a load that shoots one ragged hole at 100 yards so all good there, just need a deer to let me test the bullet on...
Noah skipped school again Friday and Andrea took the afternoon off so we headed to camp for the weekend. I never seen anything Friday night, Andrea was much the same. Saturday morning was much the same with the temperature starting to dip below freezing. The weather had been a mix of snow and freezing rain all day Friday and into the morning Saturday. It started to clear early afternoon and we headed off to our respective stands. Andrea seen a couple of deer but they circled around her not giving her a shot. I watched a nice six pointer come in from the south at about 80 yards, rubbing like crazy, I knew his rub line was going to take him east away from me so I started blowing hard on a doe bleet and eventually got him to turn around. He was in no hurry though ambling around but coming into the little clearing where I was setup. he eventually made his way right to my perfect spot, stopping to sniff at a doe scent drip I had setup. He was standing right at 25 yards, perfect broadside so I obligingly drew back my bow string, centering the pin right on his lungs....as I squeezed the trigger on the release he stepped forward but the arrow buried itself in his side.
The buck reacted like a pack of demons were after him, he whirled around plunging back the way he had came, running head first into a huge old oak tree, staggering sideways before plunging full tilt away to the east across the field. After waiting a bit I got down to retrieve my arrow...but, there was no arrow...nothing, no blood, no hair, nothing...it was rapidly growing dark as was my mood. I turned around and there were two button bucks standing there looking at me trying to figure out what was standing there. I honked my buck call a couple of times and they decided to retreat, leaving me to retrieve my gear and hike the hill to camp. Once I returned to camp Andrea and Noah grabbed more flashlights and we headed back down, it had been 75 minutes since I shot the deer so I was comfortable with making a little noise while trying figure out what was going on.
After looking around a little bit, Noah found my broad head laying in a crook of the oak tree the deer had run into, snapped right off. There was a bit of hair and blood on the broad head so I felt better knowing that I had made a decent shot. We moved out into the field scouring for any drop of blood, anything to track but nothing. After an hours search we called it a night, it was below zero and it seemed like a better idea to come back in the morning and see if we could find something.
Noah and I headed out at first light while Andrea went to her tree stand to hunt. I climbed back in the stand where I shot from and sent Noah into the field until he was standing where I thought the buck had ran off. I met him there and we started searching for any drop of blood, hair anything but there was nothing...we kept searching and I had the idea to follow his rub line as it would seem familiar to a panicked deer..(what do I know). There was a point where an older trail branched south and we tried that as well and nothing...Noah was getting bored as we had been searching hard for well over 90 minutes and if we had not found there broad head the previous night there would have been no indication I had even hit the deer. Noah started wandering around just wandering through the woods and gave an excited yell...he found where the buck had laid down, there was a relatively small pool of blood and just to the side I found the arrow, heavily coated with blood.
By this time I figured Andrea would be done her morning hunt so I called her on the radio to get her to join us while we started following the blood trail. Unfortunately there was not much of a blood trail and what there was, was very dark with no bright or bubbly blood. It had now been 16 hours since I shot him, so we felt he should be down if he was going down. I had a dark nagging feeling he was not hit badly, there was hardly any blood but off we went, he jumped the fence onto the next fence, up the hill and crossed a large open patch of ground. We found very little blood, none on any branches just occasional drops on the the ground or leaves. (The temp was still hovering just below freezing and most of the blood we found was completely frozen so he had likely made the whole journey the previous evening) We never found a place where he had laid down to rest, it was also concerning because the farther we went the less blood we found. We went large pieces of ground seeing nothing, using intuition to guess where he went and getting lucky and finding one or two drops of blood and continuing on. We tracked him over and under fences, through heavy brush and open ground, the further we went the less blood there was until we finally there was nothing...we spent a long time just circling around starting over, while Noah just explored looking in every nook and cranny but nothing.
Finally we had to reluctantly admit defeat, we had tracked there buck over 3 kms with no sign that he a stopped to rest, no large pools of blood nothing. I figure I either hit him to high and it was just a meat wound that will likely heal or I knicked his liver and not sure what will happen but we watched the whole area the next 24 hours for crows and listened for coyotes and nothing...
I had planned to stay up for a few more days rifle hunting but Sunday night the temp plunged to -20 and we found out there was a large amount of drafts in the camp. We knew we had to do some work to tighten up the place but wow, there is no seal around the joint between the floor and walls...I decided after hunting Monday morning that a cold air bed held little appeal alone when I could go home to a hot shower, a hot tub, a hot wife or sleep alone on a cold air mattress...hmmm this cat is not in the army any more folks, I went home.
Noah and Andrea are both off Friday so we will go back up Thursday night and try again...until next week have a good one.
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