Sorry for the long read. Feel free to skip it if you like.
It was a tough weekend. This past weekend I went to hunt at Wattensaw WMA in Arkansas. This is a highly pressured WMA with some very well educated deer.
I had been wanting to look at a particular spot so when I got there at 2:30 on Friday afternoon, I showered, dressed and left. It was around a 3/4 mile walk in from where I parked. I sneaked through the woods and found an old grown up road bed paralleling an old grown up field. As soon as I found the trail and two scrapes I knew I'd found my spot. The wind was forecast to be out of the north-east all evening which would be blowing into the old field, so I found a tree downwind of the trail and climbed up. The woods there were down right wooly, but I had some good clear shots.
At around 5:15 I decided to lightly hit the rattle bag. I carry two grunt calls, so I grunted with one, then the other and hit the rattle bag trying to imitate a sparring match but not a full blown fight. When I was done I made my first big mistake. I hung the rattle bag right behind me on my Realtree EZ hanger. At 5:30 I heard what I knew was a deer walking the trail. My first glimpse of him was the back half of him and my first thought was "OH MY GOD!" He was a huge bodied deer. I raised my binoculars and saw his rack. He was a fantastic 8 point. I really can't guess what he would have scored because his body was so freaking big.
Anyway, he was 30 yards out through the thick stuff. He worked a scrape and then walked on until he hit where I'd walked in. He then turned and walked straight toward me. When he got to 20 yards he spotted me. I was standing up holding my bow in front of me with my release already hooked on. He bobbed his head for a minute and (I suppose thanks to my ASAT 3D suit) decided I was nothing to worry about and turned 90 degrees and walked to my right.
His path was going to take him behind a cedar tree and then into an opening at exactly 20 yards. As he went behind the small cedar I started drawing. Just as he was reaching the clearing I reached full draw and that's when it happened. Just as I hit full draw my elbow hit the rattle bag and pinned it against the tree. He froze before he was totally clear and I knew the jig was up. There was a tiny branch hanging down halfway between him and me and my mind was racing. Try to shoot over it? Try to squat down? Try to let down? Hold and see what happens?
Well, I decided to shoot over it, which would have worked, but it was a piss-poor call. I didn't factor in the fact that he was on full alert. At the shot he dropped and wheeled left (away from me). I watched my NAP Killzone impact what looked like just below the spine. I was ecstatic! I'd just arrowed the biggest deer I'd ever seen!
I got down, found my arrow and it was smeared with blood, but there was a lot of meat on the broad head. I laid the arrow down in the direction he'd ran, marked the spot with my GPS and, since I'm colorblind, retreated to get help.
We got back there about three hours after the shot and even though we looked for four hours we didn't find a single drop of blood. We decided that since it was going to get down to 38 degrees that night we would come back in the morning and try again.
We got back out there at about 8:00 am and did circles until we finally found blood and then the track was on but the trail wasn't a good one. A drop here and there, then a patch about the size of a softball where he'd stopped and stood still. We didn't find a single place where he'd laid down. I had some of the best blood trailing fellows I've ever seen, but finally, after tracking a minimal trail for a quarter mile the blood stopped. We tore that area apart for another four hours, but nothing.
All I can figure out is that when that buck was wheeling to turn away his body was angled so that what looked like an impact below the spine was actually above the spine.
I can't tell you how awful I feel about this. This is the first deer that I've ever hit that I didn't recover. I've heard time and again that "If you hunt long enough it's going to happen to you." Well, it happened, and it sucks. What makes it worse is that he was HUGE. Maybe not a huge set of antlers, but he was a huge, mature buck.
I keep doing the "if only" thing. The one that really makes me kick myself in the butt is the thought that if only I hadn't hung that stupid rattle bag behind me. How stupid was that? I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn't thinking at all when I did it.
I tried to hunt the next day but my heart just wasn't in it. I've been beating myself up pretty hard over this, but I'll be going back there on Friday and setting up a little farther up the same trail. With any luck I'll at least see him again and feel better about this. With some good luck maybe I'll finish the job.