I think mobow touched on a good point here. When you are letting a deer set overnight, it is normally because the shot wasn't immediately fatal, and you are giving theanimal time to die before you begin to track it. These are estimates here, but consider this: You hit a deer (lets say gut shot) at 730pm. This deer takes 8 hours to die. Let me know if this is unreasonable...I think it's not too far fetched though. Anyways, you begin tracking this deer at 700am the next morning, and due to you leaving the deer alone the night before, you find it within 200 yds, and less that an hour later. Say 800am. So....even though you didn't recover the deer until 12.5 hours after the shot, it has really only been dead for 4.5 hours. I would think the meat is still ok.

Granted, this is just one senario with some made up numbers, but do you see how the time between when you shoot the deer and when you recover it isn't nessessarily the time the meat was laying out, unprotected.

This is just a rough example. Every senario is different, every outcome is different. I don't know for sure if the meat will be ok, I don't think anyone will be able to give you a solid answer. I would think in general if you recover the meat before the following afternoon sun hits it...it should be ok. But thats just a guess.