Anyway, with it being 90 degrees and 80 - 90% humidity, we were pretty sweaty when we started hunting around 4:47PM. (I checked my watch). And the wind (was maybe 1mph) was at our back. My buddy was in the new ladder and I was on the ground in my leafy wear sui, in a ditch with some brush piled up around me.
Around 6 I hear a deer snort well behind me towards my buddy. Then I get a text. "Man, I must stink. She was 100yds away." I thought yeah, but we also just put in a new ladder (metal smell) put minerals down, threw out some corn and other stuff so maybe she was just freaked by everything.
Another hour goes by and the woods is just quiet. I mean it's still hot so I am not expecting much. Then I see a buck pop in to my left about 40 yds. He starts thrashing a tree and a second one comes in behind him. The first one starts down towards my mineral spot and the second one - the one I though I wanted to take - starts going more left and is still 35 - 40 yds. Ole' #1 gets to 20 yds and looks right at me. He's broadside and has his near leg kind of raised like he is gonna do the stomp thing. I know my time is short so I tuck one in behind that leg. The Igniter worked perfectly and I knew he was hit hard by the Ramcat sitting on top of my 425gr arrow. He takes off running like he's hit hard. My buddy tests me to see if I shot and while I am answering him, the other one start snorting and stomping. He's now about 60 yds away. I get still and he just keeps at it. Finally he works his way back down to me but just a little farther out than before. No way I could cock the little Micro or anything so I just wait. As soon as he got directly downwind it was 1 more snort and he was gone. I thought, good, now I can go find my arrow. I do that and my buddy starts my way. He bought a blood light last year, and had shot a doe earlier in the day and said it worked great. I was very skeptical, but figured, hey, let's try it out. It turns out that they do work very well. The blood popped off the forest floor much better than with my plain old headlamp. This was on fresh blood, but it was a help. I'll probably pick one up at some point.
My arrow hit right behind the leg, but as I said that was forward a bit, so I hit the front part of the lungs and the Ramcat buried in the offside shoulder. The arrow was broken with about 4" left in the deer. No pass through. But even still the blood was good and not too hard to track, but the blood light certainly helped through the tall grass where it was harder to find the drops. I'd estimate that he went only about 100yds. So while I'm bummed that it didn't pass through, it did go through both lungs and the offside shoulder and was probably within 1/2" of actually breaking the skin on the offside. Ferrule was OK but the blades were toast. This was on a mature 2 1/2 yr old deer. Maybe next year I'll up my total arrow weight a bit. The horns are not big (7 pointer) but pretty wide, but he had a nice body and was a very fat healthy deer. I think I'm going to do a skull mount.
I thank God for the deer and the hunt and the ability to use him to help feed people at the food shelter.
a blood light did it make the blood glow like on a TV cop show?
....nice job, brother!
