Did I make the shot or not?

[BRazz]

I know many folks don't like reading long posts, and I summarized my final archery weekend with a looooong post. But this question is really burning a hole in my head - your input is appreciated!!!

I was very confident in a shot I made on a really nice bull Sunday morning. Both my brother (10 yards behind me) and I watched the arrow strike the middle of the chest, right in line with the back of the front leg. Essentially a bullseye. We found the arrow with blood on it, and the blood on the ground indicated a lung hit. Long story short, we couldn't recover him and we're devastated. We tracked blood - sometimes on our hands and knees - for over 6 hours, and finally lost hope.

When other hunters have told their version of this tale, I have rolled my eyes a little and presumed the shot was not actually placed where they thought. Now it's happened to me! My question is - am I crazy? Am I just imagining that the shot was a good one, or are there any other explanations for our misfortune?

BTW, I'm heading back up this afternoon with a posse of friends, permission to cross private property to get closer, and my neighbor's drahthaar - a hunting dog essentially bred for tracking game (the trail will be a couple days old, so it's a long shot).

[JGH]

Very tough call ... our memories in these situations are not always reliable. We do, I think, almost all the time "see" what we want to see.

I really believe that a person's memory of the event can be both entirely honest and entirely wrong ... the two are not exclusive.

Now, that said, animals can and do live with severe wounds. We try to put arrows where we do because the odds of a kill in those spots are so high ... but they are never 100%. Remember, President Reagan was shot in the left side of the chest, from the side, with the bullet stopping somewhere near the heart. If I was shooting a man from the side, that is what I would consider a perfect shot, yet he survived to eventually die of Alzheimer's Disease.

Shot some pronghorn this weekend with rifles with a friend. Afterward, recounting the stories, I noticed that we had different ideas of the stalks, and different memories of the hits. We thought we'd leave the differences to the ultimate judge: the necropsy done in the garage, but it never did answer the questions we had.

"Was he going right-to-left, or left-to-right?" ... "Was this the first shot, or the second?"

Amazing, I thought, that we could disagree about such basic questions.

[BrentLaBere]

I was going to post on your other thread but wasn't sure what to say. I lost one this year due to hitting it in the shoulder. I thought I made a great shot but turned out to be a lost animal (and hopefully safe one). IT SUCKS! First time its ever happened to me and I feel it should have been a chip shot.

Things happen in the moment that you may not have been aware of. You flinched, hit a branch, rest got bumped so your timing is off on your drop away......I mean the possibilities are endless. I am not saying these things happened just what went through my head.

Any chance he was possibly quartering to......the slightest bit? A deflection off a rib, like mentioned before, could send that arrow back and across the guts. With you possibly clipping a lung and finding that type of blood...and then losing the blood trail with it getting blocked up inside. I find it hard to believe if it was in the boiler room full pass through he would expire within the distance you tracked. Could you have shot too low? Steep angle down to the elk with the shot possibly being low and even lower on the exit side?

I feel your pain and there is nothing anyone can say that will make up for it. I know.....and I hope you have some success or at least put your mind to rest knowing you are doing everything you can to find it. Stay positive!