I have a pic of him on Saturday evening at 9:00pm and he doesn't have any marks there so I'm figuring someone shot him Monday.
This is the buck I was hoping to take on yesterday when I shot the 8pt seeing how he was already hit. What do you think his chances are of recovering? I read that a lot of these kinds of hits will kill them later on if infections set in?? What do you guys think?
Mike
Hope you guys are right and it is from something else though.
Ben
A long time ago, when I gun hunted, a friend and I ran into a guy in a dense set of pines in rifle season who said he was hunting a big buck he had hit in archery season. He said he hit him in the right shoulder, and that he was still alive and he had seen him a few days prior not far from where we were standing, but couldn't get a shot at him. We decided to try to push some of the surrounding thickets... quiet little 3 man drives.
About an hour later, I was on stand and they pushed out several does and fawns with 'his' buck trying hard to keep up. He was limping on his right front leg but running. As they ran through a stand of quaking aspen about 80 yards away, I followed him in the scope and could see a pale discolored spot on the point of his shoulder. I shot him through the chest and he dropped.
When I got to him, I noticed he was missing some hair around the wound and had already shed one antler, and when I rolled him over to field dress him, the other side bumped the ground and fell off too. I field dressed him, drug him down to the lake, went home and got the canoe and rowed across and took him out.
When I skinned him, I saw some stuff in there I've never seen before or since. He had no fat on him, and under his skin, his entire body was a weird purplish color with odd looking/colored blood vessles/capilaries spiderwebbing everywhere, and the closer I got to the wound, the more yellowish infection I encountered and the worse it smelled. I thought maybe I could utilize the backstraps and hind quarters, but EVERYthing smelled rotten... inside the backstraps, everything. His whole body was full of infection, and his immune system was losing its fight.
I skinned it down far enough to see there was no broadhead left in the wound, and then pitched the whole thing. He had hit it dead center in the scapula by the ridge of the bone. I don't think he would have survived, but who knows. Animals are tough. Even so, following that, I've tried real hard not to hit the shoulder when shooting deer. It can cause a lot more suffering than people think.
Still could be an arrow wound that's getting more-infected... or a tick filling with blood and lifting the hair there... would have to be a heck of a tick though. Hmmph, interesting.
I have a bunch of day time photos of this deer and never noticed any marks till the one I posted first.
Here is a pic that was taken a few days before the season started.
Think I'll put it back out in a different area on the property on Sunday to see if I can get some more pics of this buck.
Matter of fact, I have two hides in my collection bearing most 'unique scars'. I won't 'use' them, they remain to hang over chairs, the one I use for photo backdrop. You may have seen the one in some photos I've posted over the years. It is a doe hide, a very large one, and she quite obviously survived a bear attack at one time after she had reached maturity. There's a full length rake, all claws involved, down both sides of the hide, from just behind shoulders to dropping off the flanks, and another single partial, all claws, down over the rump.
The other hide was a small, legal buck taken by an aquaintance in archery season. That one has two perfect X s, one on each side of the chest, in location that tells of a perfect, broadside double lung shot with a four blade broadhead, shot from ground height. That one, only conclusion I could/can draw is that the broadhead was in lesser condition than a field point with regards to 'sharp', there was little or no appreciable hemmorage, and the animal lay up until the wound 'knit' sufficiently?
As we should all know, and testify at every occasion...deer are an incredibly resilient life form.
Like I said, the only reason I assumed it might have been a arrow is, I have lots of pics of this buck right up to the first Wednesday of the season when I pulled the camera. I never noticed anything on him till after the season started. That, and finding a new stand that was set up 20 yards from where these pics were being taken had me thinking it could be a arrow wound.
Thanks again for the response Ed
Ben
Ben
Jes sayin'...I am not above using someone else's misfortune to my advantage ;)