After a frustrating start things finally panned out for me last night on this tender little 5 point. I hit the woods after work leaving me with just shy of an hour of daylight to hunt. The rut is on, the scrapes are opened up regularly and gun season is just a week away so I knew if I was going to appropriately break in the bow I was gifted by Paul in the bow trade this week was my best bet. I settled into my stand and let out a couple doe bleats. It didn't take but a minute and I had this deer walking right towards me from a tangle of tall grass and brush. He was broadside at about 12 yards when I focused on a spot, belated to stop him, hit my anchor point and let the arrow fly home. He spun around and took off. I watched as the arrow shaft broke off and flipped into the air. It didn't take but a second for him to disappear in the thicket he had emerged from. The shot looked good, in the ribs on the right side about half way up but because of some bad luck earlier this season and not having seen him go down I backed out after retrieving my broken arrow shaft and returned after grabbing a flashlight and fresh set of batteries about 2 hours after I had taken the shot. First blood looked good and continued that way up for about 50 yards. After that it was a speck here, a speck there as I crawled through a maze of thick tangled brush and thorns. I eventually lost the trail all together. It began to sleet and rain and I was making slow progress on the blood trail so I began to follow different trails hoping to find somewhere where the blood picked up again. I was unable to find anymore blood but did find himpiled up along one of the well worn trails. He had only made it about 100 yards with the shot only getting 1 lung and some liver, but it was a testing blood trail.
Sorry for the poor quality photos. I was hunting solo and all I had with me was my phone camera.
-Dan
