I agree that you should rethink the whole not mounting him thing. Things can go wrong any time you are shooting at a living breathing animal. The fact it is, it would have be very easy for you to chalk him up as a loss and climb back into the tree and wait for the next buck to come by. However, you show what kind of person you are buy working your butt of to recover this animal. It may not have went as planned, but IMO, your willingness to work hard to recover the animial makes this a bigger trophy than what it would have been if everything went according to plan.