Well so far it has been a generally non-eventful season up until the evening of the 18th. I had a really nice buck come into my sons tree stand that evening which I was hunting because he has not been able to get our much with the arrival of his new son. It was the first buck I've even seen this season so far. The deer have been fairly scarce in our little 40 acre plot of state land this season so far. I've had a number of does come in but no bucks.
Well the worst thing that I feel can happen to any hunter happened to me that Thursday evening. He came in upwind from me and didn't smell me, but when he hit the opening, he definitely seemed to "sense" something as he looked right at me and stopped dead in his tracks just out of range. I remained motionless and once he figured he was seeing things he started walking again. When he about 25 yards out I grunted to stop him, put the pin on the boiler room and fired. When I shot he was still looking my direction and must had seen the arrow in flight or "jumped the string" as we say and he went low. With him going low, the arrow hit high but below the back bone where there isn't really anything vital to hit. Crap! I watched him run off and disappear from sight.
I got down shortly after and found my arrow right away, as it passed cleanly through. As I feared, there was no blood trail to follow because of the high hit. I looked for almost an hour and found nothing. Finally about 75 yards from where I had shot him, I found blood where he had evidently stopped for a few minutes. There was quite a bit but as I followed that trail within 40 yards it stopped again. Another two hours that evening produced nothing more.
I picked it back up in the morning and walked everywhere along that trail and any others I thought he could have taken but there just was nothing more to be found. I probably covered a good 1/2 mile square that morning. A lost deer, and my worst nightmare. It's an unfortunate fact of hunting, but I don't like it none the less.
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