![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
About 4:15pm we saw our first deer. A small buck, a 4-6 point, walked by down hill from us. The closest he got was about 50 yards. I made my son pass on the shot. He was a little disappointed that he didnt' get to shoot.
About 5:00pm we saw a small doe working down our ridge. She came off the ridge to our right and walked down the hill and got no closer than 47 yards. Again I made him pass on the shot. We have lots of saplings in the area. We watched this deer feed about 80 yards away for at least ten minutes.
I saw another doe and an unknown deer up above us about 5:20pm. We only saw them briefly.
About 5:55pm I noticed a buck coming from our right walking down the side of our ridge about 75 yards away. He was walking right into our setup. Just as the buck went behind a tree I had my son get into shooting position with the crossbow on a makeshift shooting stick we made when we sat down. The nice buck walked directly across in front of us upwind at about 30-35 yards. We were about 10-15 feet above his head up the ridge. He briefly stopped about 35 yards away quartering slightly away. TWANG. The distance was perfect, but he hit too far back. I was sitting behind the log above my sons shoulder when he shot so I got an awesome view of the hit.
The buck was only very slightly quartering so I'm not sure he got into the ribcage at all. Given the light situation were were in a predicament. We waited about 10-15 minutes and decided to kill more time looking for the arrow. We never found it after about 5 minutes of looking. I decided to look for blood. I found what appeared to be his tracks tearing up the freshly wet leaves. I followed them for at least 40 yards without a single drop of blood. The tracks became hard to follow through a rocky area. I hated to go after the deer so quickly but sometimes you get lucky. As expected, my son thought he saw a white flag ahead of us about 100 yards into the tracking. We immediately backed off. I circled around the rocky area and finally found blood. There was at least a half cup full of bright red blood in an area about 5 feet long. The color made me feel good. Unfortunately this was the first blood we found. The first blood was almost 100 yards after the hit. We were using a Scorpion XP broadhead.
We went back and looked a little more for the arrow but light had escaped us. Our only option is to go back out tomorrow and try to retrieve it. The temp was in the 60s at dark and it is only getting down to about 50 here tonight. Even if we find it I'm not sure it will be fit to eat.
I am going to give it my best though. It was a very nice buck. I believe it had a wider rack than the buck I took last week. Regardless of the number of points it would make an awesome first buck for my son.
We decided to wait until after the early church service tomorrow to try to find it. My son figures he has something extra to pray for. I figure if is dead at 7am it will be just as dead at 10:30am.
Fingers crossed.
DuckHunt