My brother wounded a 6 point buck juuuuuuuuust before sunset. The buck turned tail and ran so Mike fired off a hail Mary shot as it hopped the barbed wire - he figures that’s where the other half of the rack went. His hunting party met up near the stand, laid their rifles around the pickup, and set off to track the un-dead deer.
They followed light blood stains for a while and a couple of spots of darker pools across the swamp and through the cornfield until, finally, in a clearing, they found the still-living deer - using flashlights and the buck’s reflecting eyes. At this point anything they did to the deer wasn’t strictly legal as hunting laws here do not take kindly to shooting things after dark but, well, you know, it’s not quite right to just leave the poor thing just lying out there.
Now remember, all of their rifles are back at the truck, but one bright spark said “Wait, I have my pistol with me - let me go get that.” I suppose the theory was that shooting a dying deer after dusk with a handgun was slightly less illegal.
The friend returned with the handgun and popped off a shot from about 25 yards away which, apparently, did nothing more than glance off the buck’s skull and either enrage or scare it further, because he got to his feet and charged straight at my brother. By this time the only thought going through Mike’s head was, “I’ll be FUCKED if I’m going to track this stupid deer all goddamn night,” so he did the only logical thing he could do: He grabbed it by that half rack and bulldogged it. The buck’s back hooves went through his blaze, through his sweatshirt, through his tshirt, through his longjohns, and left a total of about 3 feet of welts across his back. Another member of the party jumped into the fray and dispatched the deer with a knife.
Absolutely no alcohol was involved in this incident. No, I didn’t believe that, either.
My husband is an avid hunter, and he always says that the code of the true hunter is to be sure you can make a clean kill, or not shoot at all. That is, Hail Mary shots are not allowed by his code.
Once they located it, they should just have left it there to bleed out and stiffen up. Coming back for it in the morning would have been perfectly workable. Wounded deer normally look for a place to lay down. Over-eager hunters who push them too hard immediately after wounding them actually make their own job harder.
Heh, I was part of a scene like that - with a damn fish that simply would not die.
I was fishing with a friend of mine from a canoe when he caught a very large pike - maybe 15-20 pounds. After a lengthy struggle we managed to wear it out and haul it inboard. Then our troubles begain.
The usual method we used to kill fish we caught was to wack them over the head with the back of a hatchet while it was propped against the gunnel of the canoe. We wached it hard, but this seemed merely to wake the fish up. It started to fight in earnest for its life (in spite of having, we thought, been tired out). It flapped about and snapped at everything it could reach - my buddy almost had us in the water, trying to avoid it biting his feet (pike have nasty teeth) or being hooked by the fishhooks flailing about from the spinner.
Then, I took a knife and stabbed it through the head. This appeared to do the trick - but only for a moment; it was back to flailing about more madly than before; the bottom of the canoe was covered in slime and blood. My friend used his knife to cut it open and, basically, gut it. That seemed, again, to finally kill it. We shoved the body under the seat and started to clean up a bit (you gotta imagine the scene - the two of us fighting this thing, trying not to be bitten or hooked, while the canoe rocked madly, knives stabbing, hatchet hammering - it’s amazing we weren’t injured or overturned).
Then, as we were cleaning up some of the blood, slime, fish guts, etc. all over us & the canoe - it starts flapping again. I was tempted to heave it overboard, but after what we had been through, I wasn’t going to not have dinner. I put a foot on it and it eventually stopped moving, dead at last.
Ah, the Texas Heart Shot. Sorry, even at a wounded deer this is poor technique and worse sportsmanship. Either practice more at the range or practice more patience in tracking. Had either of these been employed the wrestling match would have been unnecessary.
</carry on>
Well if even lions – who as a species have many, many more years of evolution to back up their hunting skills over us – can get it wrong sometimes, maybe you shouldn’t feel quite so bad.
I’ve finished a couple with a knife, myself. In both cases, the deer had a broken spine (one shot, one hit by a car) and the rear legs were paralyzed. The front ones alone were more than enough to make it interesting. If the situation permits, I prefer to just let them bleed out while I wait.
