That said, the last night my buddy and I went to a ridge where I had seen elk and heard a bull bugle a few evenings before. We got to the spot and waited for about 20 minutes to see if we could hear anything. All was quiet so we tried to get them to talk with a bugle with no luck. I then let out a cow call and was answered by a bull up the ridge, and fairly close. We had a bit of time (it was about 6PM), so we decided to set up to see if we could call him in. My buddy put out a decoy and I set up about 20 yards off of the spine of the ridge to get ready.
Well, the bull kept playing the game and started coming -- and pretty much on a string to the calls and the decoy (which were about 50 yards down the ridge from where I set up). It was picture perfect.
As the bull approached me I drew undetected. As the bull was broadside to me, I put my pin right on his heart and released. I didn't stop him, as I thought I'm only 20 yards and it shouldn't make much of a difference (he was steadily moving in). I was wrong. I released and watched my arrow hit about a foot behind where I was aiming.
The shot was a complete pass through, but was back and low. Unbeknownst to me, the bull ran off and stopped as my buddy cow called on the other side of the spine of the ridge from me, about 40 yards away. I walked up to see my buddy and inspect the impact site and bumped the bull.
The blood trail produced a good amount of red blood initially -- not bright, not dark. We followed it for about a quarter of a mile and it faded to a drop here and there. We decided to back out and pick up the trail the next morning as he seemed headed toward a thick canyon and we hoped he'd bed up and expire. Unfortunately it rained all night and any blood we had was lost the next day. We scoured the canyon, which was pretty narrow, to no avail. For him to get out of there, he likely wasn't hit fatally. If I had to guess, my arrow passed through somewhere behind the lungs and heart and below the liver.
So two things have stuck with me, beyond the grief of wounding an animal and failing to put my hands on an elk once again. The first is around shooting at a moving animal. I thought at that distance and at the speed he was moving it wouldn't make much difference. The engineer in me started doing some math after the fact. My bow travels at about 280 ft/s. It should have covered the 20 yards in about .2 seconds. Assuming the elk was moving at a speed of around 3 mph, he was covering about 4.4 ft/s. That means, in .2 seconds he would cover nearly a foot. Shows just how much that can change the point of impact. I should've stopped him broadside instead of taking that shot. Lesson learned.
Secondly, play it cautiously when approaching the impact site, especially if you have lost sight of the animal. I could've likely put another arrow in him had I done that. Instead I bumped him. Another lesson learned.
It totally sucks on a bunch of levels, but figure if someone else can learn from my mistakes at least some good may come out of this. It's going to be a long year waiting to chase elk again...
I hunted 12 days and also learned some things. Knowing the unit can turn a frustrating morning into a different scenario. . . I chased some bulls on the last day, which almost never works in my experience. But if I'd known the unit better, I would have known that a road extended down, which would have allowed me to get in FRONT of the elk instead of chasing them. Coulda turned out way differently. . . .
I lost a bull sitting over a wallow. Quartered away shot, hit too far right (I believe), and armpitted him. Same thing happened to my buddy last year on a bull in WY. I don't think I'll ever take another quartering away shot. I didn't miss by much, and it turned into a wound. If he'd been broadside, it would probably have been a dead elk. . .
I had also just returned a couple of months ago from a 17 day trip to AFrica. Because that screwed my schedule up, I didn't get my schedule as clear for this hunt as I would have liked, and ended up having to cut two days off the end of the hunt to get back and take care of some work matters that cropped up. My fault. Should have engineered the schedule better.
The only good thing, as I left the mountains, I missed a telephone call. . . turns out I won a raffle hunt for a Kamchatka Snow Sheep. . . That made the drive home a little less bitter at least. . .
Don't beat yourself up over it, but at the same time don't take it too lightly and brush it off as no big deal, as some are wont to do.
We all make mistakes and your sharing may help some of us avoid one.
Carl
And to the OP, I'd bet that elk walk faster than 3 mph.
When in college, there was a trail I often walked that had mile markers and I got a 3 mph stride down pat and would hit each mile marker at exactly 20 minute increments. I would guess that elk walk faster than 3mph. Probably 4-4.5 or so. Following elk that are moving from point A to point B and not grazing along the way is a challenge to keep up.
Totally agree. I used 3 mph as a conservative number just to show how much an object moves even at that speed (about the speed a person walks).
Coelker,
I've always felt that way. I chose to lower my point of aim for two reasons. One, I felt it was an absolute chip shot and even if I missed by a few inches I should be good (bad assumption). Secondly, I dropped off the spine of the ridge a bit and was accounting some for the angle of shooting up. In hindsight, it really wasn't that much of an angle. Had my point of aim been six to eight inches higher I'm fairly confident I would've caught the backend of the lungs or the liver at worst.
The difference in my situation was that I was able to watch the bull after the shot. I could see he was hurt, but couldn't get a grasp on how quickly it would do him in. I tried to sneak in for a follow up, but he just kept moving away quick enough that I couldn't keep pace. A 101 yard pin would have come in handy.
I trailed him through some north-facing timber for the rest of the day, slowly. I lost the track near nightfall, and without a plan of attack from there, I headed back out to the truck.
The next day I came back and started grid searching in the area I had last blood and found the bull not 200 yards from where I stopped trailing. Unfortunately, I packed all the meat off the mountain, but was only able to save a small amount of it in the end.
Thanks for sharing. I just came back from an "unsuccessful" elk hunt as well. We live and we learn.
