I oblige and change plans with the family and ask him for details at which point he tells me the doe is still standing in the field 100 yards away hunched over now 30 minuted after the shot I tell him that doe is probably gut shot and not to leave his stand but he insists it is hit perfectly and that it is already dead but just does not know it.
I arrive to the field 30 minutes later and he meets me at my car - so much for staying put! He got out of his stand and bumped the doe and how now changed his mind about his shot placement on the doe. he now thinks he has also missed the fawn because there was no sound at impact and he retrieved his perfectly clean arrow.
I suggest we wait three hours then see if we can get that doe. He said there was good blood sign but the combine came into the field while he was bumping the doe and ran over his arrow.
After three hours of waiting we go after the doe and succeed in bumping her twice. I advise him that we will just cotinue to bump her right off the property and that we will have to wait till morning.
In the morning not 10 hours after we last bumped her we do a search. I suggest we search the river because the doe will likely seek water when its hit. Within a few minutes this is what I find:
[/URL]The yotes had already done a number on her and we were both very disappointed in the waste. The shot had been a gut shot and we may have been able to recover her had she not been bumped.
A day later I returned to find the yotes had moved her to a better spot on shore and this was all that was left:
[/URL]For some reason I took one of her jaw bones and buried it in an ant hill for a couple weeks. This was the "cleaned" Product:
[/URL]After having that jaw bone sit at my work bench for the last couple of years I finally figured out what to do with it.
I cleaned it up, cut the ends off it and removed the marrow and make a template of the hollow. The I spent three weeks scouring ebay to find the right blank, here is the blank damascas blade with the template sitting on it.
[/URL]Several hours of angle grinding, table grinding and filing later, I reduced the tang as below:
[/URL]Once it fit nicely I peroxided the bone and apoxied the blade to its handle. not a pro job by any means but at least I was able to use something from that terrible day. Now I need to learn some leather work to make a nice sheath and thats my knife for net season:
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