Every bow hunter should watch this, especially if you hunt alone. This is just plain scary and sent chills through me. I will definitely be adding items to my pack.
Can someone please post a link to this?
I don’t know why we don’t all hunt with 18” of stout, Latex tubing worn around our necks. Clotting compound in the pack but right handy, and yeah.... Super Glue.
Any Airborne/Rangers/SEALs care to share what you wear & carry?
Glad they posted that incident and also what the Dr. stated in the comments below on YouTube. Tourniquet the leg and then check out the wound, dress it and then take off the tourniquet to see if your packing/dressing job will hold up or not. Very good info there.
--Mitch
I may need to add a clotting pack to my emergency kit.
About 5 miles in and had a hunter shoot an elk. I was 19 or 20 at the time.
He wanted to help skinning and I let him. I was skinning out the front shoulder for the cape and he was working on the hind leg. I heard him yelp and then start cussing. I looked up as he went down.
I asked what happened and he didn’t respond - just sat there looking down. I set my knife down and went around back of the elk to see what was going on. His face was white as a sheet and it really spooked me.
I looked down and saw his knife sticking out of his thigh. Talk about an “Oh Shit” moment!
I was surprised at the lack of massive amounts of blood. It looked to be stuck in about 3” deep in the upper part of his thigh and toward the inside.
I looked at the hunter and told him we were going to have to get that knife out and deal with the wound. He started going a little nuts on me and kept telling me that we couldn’t take it out or he would bleed to death. I assessed the wound and since blood was not squirting out, I hoped that the femoral wasn’t cut but if we moved him with the knife in there, it might do just that. I pulled off my shirt and cut it to use for a bandage and laid it out next to his leg. I had to talk him down and eventually he agreed and looked the other way as I very carefully pulled the knife out. Again, I was surprised that blood didn’t spray out everywhere - just very dark blood and it kind of poured out of the wound. I took some wadded up cloth and pushed down on the wound. He passed out. I grabbed a strip of shirt and pushed it under his leg then up and over. It was really tough to get that around his leg while holding pressure on the wound and him totally out. I was able to get it around and tied so I could free up my hands. The blood soaked up the cloth pretty quick but it appeared to be holding.
I was very shaken up and could not stay on my feet when I stood up and had to sit right back down. After a few minutes, my head cleared and I was able to get up. The hunter started stirring and I went and got him some water. I put another strip around his leg and found a branch to twist and maintain pressure.
He seemed to be better so I started gathering stuff up into our packs. I moved all our gear away from the elk and pulled everything out of my pack except the water and put on my jacket.
He was looking better after some water and rest and I told him we were going to have to walk out. We went very slowly with him leaning on me the whole way out and stopped a lot. That wrap with the stick certainly helped to keep the bleeding down but his whole leg was blood soaked and down int his boot when we finally got back to the truck after 2 in the morning. We were both pretty covered in blood and probably looked like something out of a horror movie. He was in pretty bad shape and I thought he might not make it.
Drove like a madman to the nearest hospital - another 2 hours away. He was out when I got there so I ran in and got help. Not sure how much blood and fluids they put back into him but they got him fixed back up.
I slept a few hours on a couch in the ER and called my boss to let him know what what had happened. He showed up with horses about 10 and we went back in to get the elk and gear we left behind. Ended up having to run a bear off the elk and lost quite a bit of it. We got as much meat and the head pulled together. Loaded it all up on horses and walked the loaded horses out.
The doctors fixed up the hunter and he had a full recovery. They told me he was super lucky that he missed the femoral by about an 1/8”.
That was a very bad situation that I never want to go through again!
There are great products out there now for first aid that should be in everyone’s pack - bandages, clotting agents, and tape. Pretty amazing how good cell coverage is in some pretty remote places but those Spots are another amazing tool to get help in the middle of nowhere.
A buddies dad was leaving for a Bowhunting trip many years ago and while carelessly carrying his arrows out the front door one of the nok ends caught on the door jamb and he walked right into his arrow, burying it in his abdomen. Some pretty obvious lessons here.....
Video was definitely an eye opener. Very fortunate that they had cell reception. I’ll be adding, at least a couple of items in my whitetail pack for sure. It’s not very far back to the house or vehicle, but better safe than sorry.
Be safe!
They are only about $10/pair on Amazon and part of my butchering kit, along with disposable rubber gloves, meat bags etc.
The elk retrieval was a whole other story. I have a friend with horses, so we were able to ride all the way in. Our plan was to tie the quarters over the riding saddles so they would sit evenly like a rider and lead the horses out. We had no problems getting the meat on each horse and tied down. As we headed downhill, my horse and I were about a hundred or so yards ahead of my friend and his horse. We were on a short, downhill course when I noticed the saddle and load on my horse moving forward quickly, pinning the front legs causing my horse to fall. He wasn't hurt, so I started to unload the meat and take the saddle off. My horse just laid there, nice and calm. Suddenly, the other horse came running down the slope, saddle and meat hanging under the horse, my friend running to catch up. I stopped the horse. Apparently his horse had the same thing happen as mine, saddle riding up, horse falling. While he was trying to untangle his horse, he got kicked in the ribs. We ended up hanging the meat up again. My saddle was intact, his was broken. He was having a tough time breathing so I saddled my horse so he could ride it out while I led the other one (riding bareback, downhill was not in this girl's best interest). When we got down, he ended up in the ER, ribs broken and separated from the sternum. Why did the saddles slip? We didn't have the butt straps on the saddles to keep them from moving up! Lesson learned!
BTW, I did recruit another friend who, along with a wheeled cart, managed to get the elk out without incident.
My survival/first aid kit is always with me in a pack, even when scouting, fishing, biking, whatever. Surprising how many folks think its only needed when "hunting".
After shooting a buck in the morning, I decided to bone him out before crossing the river. I had tagged him on the front leg with a zip tie before dragging him to the spot I wanted to bone him out. Before beginning I decided to cut the zip tie in order to keep the tag from getting covered in blood and to put it in my pack along with the meat when I finished. I have used a Havalon for years, boned out multiple elk, deer, antelope, and always say to people "It's an awesome knife. You just can't make a mistake"!
Well.... I made a mistake... I know the rules of knife safety, but a momentary lapse cost me. While trying to get the zip tie off I slipped, stabbing length ways into my left ring finger. The pain was unreal. I had severed the nerve, and I could instantly feel the tendon retracting into the lower part of my finger. I ended up gutting the buck with one and half hands, dragged him across the river, somehow got him into my truck, dunked the finger in the river to clean it off (major ouch) , and drove to the hospital. A few days later I had surgery and went under to get the tendon and nerve re-attached. I'm super thankful I wasn't in the back country on an elk hunt, but I learned a valuable lesson. I have been pretty fortunate as far as injuries my whole life, but it really can happen to anybody. After my injury I have really made a point to be a lot more purposed when using my knife, especially when solo in the back country. Scary stuff for sure.
Yeeeow! That’s a bad one! Crazy what a really sharp knife can do and how fast it happens!
Jim:
I really had no other option at the time. If I had tried to move him any distance, I think that knife would have cut more and likely cut his femoral. I did push it away from the edge - to the back - when I pulled it out. Almost passed out myself right then! I was one freaked out kid for sure through that whole incident.
Fawn:
funny thing, and I would be surprised if you remember, but you fixed me up a couple of times in Leadville. Once was a broad head incident and another was a knife cut. I gotta say, after that broad head cut, I would never want to actually be shot with one! Amazing how much a guy can bleed from a 3-blade puncture wound and how hard it is to stop that bleeding. Ended up re-opening that wound breaking down a mule deer buck the next day up on the hill and had to glue it back up with fletching cement. Super glue type glues work really well and I actually put that tube in my pack on your suggestion! Thank you!
I always threaten to get a cut proof glove but I never do. Maybe next year! Those Havalons are scary. The way they cut through that meat like it’s not there....that’s what they’ll do to you too!
Sharp things cut- and don't care what
And a clotting agent isn't going to stop the bleeding from an artery that will kill you. The only thing that stops that bleeding is direct pressure, tourniquets, and/or sewing/clamping off the artery.
We (people who work in an ER) often times have to bite our lips and hide our laughter from people who freak out from what may look like a lot of blood loss, but really is insignificant blood loss. Thorton and fawn will back me up on this as we so often hear from panicking patients/relatives, "I've lost a lot of blood!" or "He's bleeding to death!" while the patient plays the part feigning last seconds of life with a totally normal blood pressure. And they've lost a cup or two of blood, maybe more, but not even enough to even come close to death.
Seriously, you can lose a ton of blood and be just fine. You can suffer a pretty bad flesh wound and be just fine, just as fawn's story shows (so long as you don't panic). A few cups of blood loss looks like a ton of blood, but it's not even close to dangerous. Minor to moderate bleeding is more of an inconvenience than an emergency. In 23 years of medicine counting my nursing and medicine careers and education, besides non-traumatic gastrointestinal hemorrhages, I've never seen anyone bleed to death that didn't have a major artery cut except for the vena cava and femoral vein and in those cases, you will literally see handfuls of blood coming out quickly.
It may be a different scenario for people who are on blood thinners, but there's not a lot of guys on Coumadin going into the back country for days at a time.
And that brings up another issue: I honestly believe that for a lot of guys, that the risk of blood thinners outweighs the potential benefits of taking them if you're on a back country trip. I take my dad off of his daily aspirin 5 days before elk hunts in grizz country because I know the risk of bleeding to death is much higher than the risk of him having an ischemic heart attack/stroke during those two weeks. I'd encourage guys that take aspirin or anticoagulant to ask their doctor, in their specific case, if taking their anticoagulants are actually more dangerous while on a back country hunt. I'd think that your average daily white tail hunting wouldn't make a difference, but I think that taking anticoagulants in the back country is just a bad idea.
Its been 6 years [Thanksgiving] since my hand got cut - 8 tendons and 1 year of PT, but its functional
