From a treestand, the distance from your bow to the target is essentially the hypotenuse of a right triangle. the formula to figure the length of a hypotenuse is: The sq. root of the sum of the squares of the other two sides. In other words, the square root of: (the height of the bow, squared+ the distance to the deer, squared). If you do the math, you'll find the actual distance isn't that significantly different than the horizontal distance at typical treestand heights and shooting distances.