Everyone has a right to their own opinion. I can respect that. I can only relate the experiences I have had and makereasonable conclusionsfrom thoseevents.

A friend of mine owned some land that had an old railroad bridge on it. Yearsago he was hunting with a rifle and shot at a buck standing on the bridge. To his surprise at the shotthe buck jumped over the side of the bridge into the water below. When he got up to where the deer was standing, he looked over the edge of the bridgeand sure enough on the river bank lay his dead buck. He thought he made a good shot. When he skinned that deer out there wasn't a bullet hole to be found, but the deer did have a broken neck. Using the same reasoning I see in some of the posts on this thread I would conclude this deer was seeking water after he was shot if I didn't know the truth behind the story.

Again if one looks at it objectively in most cases, good cover is often in areas that arein near proximity tocreeks or rivers. The fact that water is close by in my experience is more coincidental than it is a factor in deer recovery.

My experiences, all be it not as many, also include elk. If any animal loves water it is an elk. They definitely seek water to cool themselves. A few years ago I hit a decent 5x5 too far back. Don't believe for a minute that fatally wounded animals won't go up hill. He went up the mountain side before going down in a valley (where there were creeks and ponds), then up the side of the adjacent mountain almost to the topwhere he expired. He was approximately a mile from where I shot him; not really close to any water although there was plenty of water to be had.

While we are on the subject of fever I will give one more example. I do believe that septic shock from a wound in an animal causes their body temperature to go up. A few years back I had a horse that for no good reason went terminally ill with a "twisted gut". Try as we might we did everything over the course of four days to try and save her. She was feverish AND badly dehydrated. You could not get that horse to drink a drop. I realize it is not a deer but the principle is still the same; feverish, dehydrated, and still wouldn't drink or seek out water.

I think as a human we often times are held captive by our powers of reason (if that makes any sense). We create a paradigm that keeps us from accepting an idea that is unreasonable to our way of thinking.

Our strengths for the most part are intellectual in comparison to the rest of theanimal kingdom. Deer on the other hand don't reason things out, they survive on their instincts; almost agalaxy away from our thought process. It is obvious to us that when we get dehydrated we drink to replentish lost fluids; that is sensible, logical, and we know it is medically correct. As illustratedin the above example with the horse, animals don't respond the same way we do.

Would they purposefully seek out water when wounded? My feelings are it iscertainly a reasonable place to check if you have lost the blood trail but my experience has been that cover plays a bigger role than water.