Alright where to start? First let me state I know this is a xbow bolt. I used to have a compound bow. Unfortunately due to my impending divorce the compound has disappeared. Not really sure where it went. Luckily a friend gave me a great deal on his Horton xbow. I posted here before and everybody has been very helpful so I figured i'd start here first. I had about a month to get this croosbow ready and killed a doe on opening day. I didnt hunt much last week because of the heat. I shot the bow on Monday and it was driving tacks at 25 yds. My friend and i take today off to go hunting. Its the first cool day in while and we are pumped. I went to the ground blind and wait for shooting light. This is where the story begins. At 7:45 a nice mature 9 point comes in broadside at about 18 yds. He stops to work a scrape and I let the arrow fly. He runs in the direction he was heading, I hear branches breaking and then silence. I'm so worked up I feel like i'm about to pass out. This was a nice deer. All the crap I went through this year with my wife wanting a divorce and trying to sell the house has now gone away for a moment. I had killed my first trophy deer. Or so I thought. I wait about an hour and look for the arrow. No luck. So I go get my buddy and ask him to help. After a couple minutes of looking I find blood about 10 yds from where I took the shot. Its not a ton of blood but its a fairly easy to follow trail. Still no bolt. After about 80 yds of tracking up the hill the blood is getting heavier. Then WE FIND THE BOLT and a ton of blood! Now we decide to leave and go get breakfast. We firgure the bolt should have passed through and it didn't so lets give it some time. But we firgure with the amount of blood its probably passed on. So we come back at noon and pick up our search. We are seeing lots of blood ,bright red blood. Altough I am starting to get nervous becase I don't see any bubbles in the blood. We follow the trail for another 70 yds and it heads into a thicket. The blood is starting to get less and less. But we are still seeing drops of blood every couple feet. Not the amount we had earlier but still trackable. Now I get on my hands and knees and follow it into the thicket. There were spots where this deer had to crawl through this thicket. It was on of the nastiest brair patches I have ever the displeasure of working through. We start notice that at no point has this deer bedded down yet. Then disaster strikes. I lose the trail. After about two hours my buddy finds the trail outside the thicket. But there is hardly any blood. Then as luck would have it, it starts to pour down rain. We look and look and look. We find a drop here and there then nothing. The rain has now washed away what little trail we had left. We kept searching until 6:30 and finally had to call it quits for the night. The last four hours were spent hoping to find blood or dumb across the deer. And we found neither.
I am not ashamed to say I wanted to cry. I couldn't believe I may have wasted a deer. The thing about the bolt is it had a bunch of blood on 75% of the arrow. It just didn't have any on the front. I am posting pictures of the bolt so you can see. I obviously screwed up the shot orthe arrow wouldn't look like this. I'm just not sure what went wrong. I'm guessing a shoulder shot. Anyways I feel terrible. I'm ashamed this happened and I am looking for advice. I have killed quite a few deer and this has me really messed up. I'm mad at myself because I feel like I may have rushed the shot. I didn't feel that way at the time. But now looking back at it I keep telling myself, " If you would have a couple more seconds this might not have happened". I don't know. Well thanks for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions for me i'll be on here most of the night. I don't think i'll be getting much sleep.
