My daughter and I went back and searched for a couple more hours. walking in I found a lot of blood but I thought it looked too fresh to be my deer. I told my daughter that it probably is another persons deer. It came from the same area that my deer was shot.

Later I talked to another hunter that said he helped a guy track a deer that he shot that morning. So the blood turned out to be from that deer and really made it difficult to now know what blood you may be following. I don't have access to a dog for trailing but at that point it would be difficult with all the blood from this other deer in the area.

I gave up the search. I do not give up tracking easily. I normally will search for it even if I know that the meat is no longer good. I just like to find the animal and see exactly how I hit it and just learn from the kill. But we searched a lot of area between yesterday and today and being public land with a lot of hunters th enhances of recovery at this point are minimal. Also, today is the last day of ML here in Indiana. So walking through the woods on the last day and last afternoon was not real fair to other hunters if I really believed that I was not going to find it. We tried to hit the time between when morning hunters would have left and afternoon/evening hunters would not be there yet. We hit it good and there were only two cars in the lot when we got there.

Te balls are Hornady Blackpowder. The actual weight I don't know. I am going to weigh an unfired one and the recovered one tomorrow at work to see how much of the ball I recovered.
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Here is some hair from the hit location. I was 20 feet up in a tree stand and about 50 yards away. Slightly quartering away. My aim point was mid rib cage. It's hard t tell in the pictures but the hair is white with light brown tips. bout an 1.25"-1.5"
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