You make some good points Bronko. Two years ago I had a doe travel approximately 120 yards with a perfect broadside double lung shot with a .40/200 grain XTP that exited and blew lung tissue ten feet behind her. She didn't bleed a drop for thirty yards or so, and very little for the next fifty - just a drop or two every now and then.

Fortunately she was in fifteen year old pines with not too much brush on the ground. Had that happened in the knee-high or waist-high brush of a recent clear cut I probably would never have found her.

Last year, one of our guys shot a seven pointer on a food plot that was bordered on one side by a brushy clear cut area, and on the other side by open mature pine forest. Naturally the deer ran off of the plot after the shot into the brush. Five of us searched over an hour before we found it. It was no more than 40 yards off the edge of the plot and several of us walked within five yards of it more than once without spotting it. It was a brutal search in waist-high brush with a lot of briar and blackberry. Plus, as you noted, much of the undergrowth had a lot of red spots on the leaves from recent frosts.