Always a slippery slope. I have been involved with a similar thing and ended up with the deer. I hit a buck with my bow through the boiler works and the deer ran right up to another hunter in a tree stand about 150 yds away. I was following the ample blood trail with a full pass through and saw him come out of his stand and walked up to the deer just as I got there. He did have an arrow into it but it was sticking out of his chest but in a direction that indicated he shot it when it was down. There wasn't much of an argument on who owned the deer. Around these parts local custom is whomever put the lethal shot in gets the deer. I have taken a limping deer previously wounded in the leg. Nobody came along and I tagged the buck but in that case my shot was certainly the killing shot. In some areas I have hunted local customs say first shot gets the deer but that IMO leaves a lot of gray area as indicated by my story. I have zero tolerance for anyone who uses another persons tag to justify killing an animal unless it is legal such as what is allowed in a party hunting state. Here in Vermont it is not. I ended a friendship recently with a neighbor who did a similar thing.

Not all wounded deer drop right away. Bad shots do happen. Once on the last day of the rifle season in a raging snow storm I hunted alone in a vast wilderness area in northern Vermont. I was about 1/2 mile from my truck and a nice buck was picking through the swamp about 80 yds away. I settled in made the shot and saw the deer was hit but it quickly ran out of sight. There was 6" of fresh snow so I took off tracking it. The snow from where it bedded showed my shot had been too far forward on a quartering deer breaking one shoulder. It was 7 am and I took off after the deer. The blood trail was good and I was confident I would catch up to the animal. A mile passed and I did jump it a couple of times but couldn't get a shot off. At around 2 pm I finally did get the chance to shoot it when it was bedded and looking at the GPS showed I was 5 miles away from the truck and it was all uphill. I dragged it out to a road by dark that showed on the GPS and thankfully a passing truck gave me and my buck a ride back to my truck. I was guilty of making a bad shot and that was on me. I did follow up with getting the deer but if someone else had killed it I would have certainly given it to them. That deer was probably going to eventually die but was fair game for anyone else IMO.