Ep. 29: An Impossible Blood Trail and Essential Skills After the Shot
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As a guide and hunter, I've spent thousands of days in the field. This show is about translating my hard-won experiences into tips and tactics that'll get you closer to your ultimate goal, success in the field. I'm Remy Warren. This is Cutting the Distance. There are a lot of hunting skills that are necessary for a successful hunt that happen after the trigger is pulled or the arrow is released.

So just picture this real quick. You're on the mountain. You've stalked in with your bow on a great mule deer buck. Drew back, picked a spot, and let the arrow fly. Your arrow connected. What do you do? How do you proceed? Last week, we talked about shot placements.

This week, I want to cover everything after the shot, including how to interpret that hit and how to track and approach a downed animal, as well as some standard wait times for different shots. But first, I want to share what I consider the craziest track job I've ever done. It happened on a late season archery hunt for mule deer in Montana. This particular hunt in Montana was late season during the rut, cold in a very low density unit.

So what did I decide to do? During the general rifle season, I decided to go out and hunt with my bow.

Now, that might not make sense to most people, and it sometimes doesn't even make sense to me, but I love the added challenge of it, and I love chasing mule deer with my bow. So I figured, look, I know this area really well. I decided to take a week off from guiding and just focus on hunting deer, and I thought, I've got a few things working for me. It's the rut. There's probably not very many people out there chasing them right now, and I thought, well,

Well, if I'm going to be out hunting anyways, it'd be cool to try to get a deer with my bow. Now, if that doesn't sound challenging enough, I also don't know why I did it, decided to film the whole thing solo. So a lot of things working against me, but a few things working for me, the rut factor and the knowledge of the area. I really felt like I could be successful.

So I started out hunting, started out looking in some places that I hadn't got a chance to hunt for a long time, but knew that I'd found bucks there in the past and was turning up very, very, very few deer. The temperatures dropped a couple of the days it was below zero. And then it started to warm up around 20 degrees Fahrenheit. After about three days of not seeing, well, seeing one deer, not seeing much, I continued to just check different spots and go to different places.

I ended up finding a pocket of does and a good buck in one canyon that I knew had a little bit higher deer densities for the unit compared to some of the other places that I was checking out.

So I decided, well, I'm going to keep hunting this spot until I find the buck that I want. Because there's does here, it's low density. So I'm expecting that those does will start to attract bucks as the rut kicks off. And I'll keep going back to that spot and checking. Trouble with it is it's not really great glassing country because it's fairly heavily timbered.

But it was good for still hunting where I could just kind of sneak along through old logging roads that have no driving access and then work ridges and other things into bedding areas and areas where I figured there might be better concentrations of does, maybe drawing some of these bucks out of the bigger mountains for the rut. Well, it paid off. It worked. I found a giant buck.

A buck that I would have been happy shooting with a rifle, a buck that I've been happy shooting in a trophy area or one of the top units in the state. And I just so happened to stumble on this buck with my bow in my hand. And when I spotted him, I was first looking at this group of does and he came out of the timber and he was pretty close within range.

He ended up pushing a doe away. I got in, made my stock, snuck up there, drew back. Everything looked great. He kind of turned and looked at me as I drew back, but I knew his attention was more on the does and that little bit of movement. There was actually quite a few does around me. So, you

You know, whether he pegged me and thought, oh, that's a danger or not. It was too late at this point. The arrow was on his way. The shot looks good. The buck was kind of up on a ridge and he ran off and over and down. He did like a buck, he like bucked his back legs up and ran, ran away. And I thought to myself, sweet. That was a perfect shot. Everything looked perfect about it. The way the buck acted, where I thought I saw the arrow hit, his body position, everything looked really good.

So in that scenario, you know, normally with a bow shot, let's say the best shot kind of talked about it before, but like a double lung shot, maybe that deer would expire within 15, 20, 30 minutes at the most. So it was in the evening time. I didn't want it to get too late. I figured, oh, that deer's got to be piled up.

So I gave it standard, maybe 15 minutes or so. Started walking up, found the blood, looked around for my arrow, but thought, well, maybe it sailed through. I might not find it right here, but I had a great blood trail. Analyze the blood. It had like bubbles in it. So I knew, okay, it was a lung shot. Perfect. This deer should just be piled up. Followed a trail. There's some snow and then some dry, but this trail was super easy to follow.

followed it to the first spot and there was a bed. I thought, while I'm following the trail, the wind's at my back.

I thought, well, maybe he just fell over here and then got up, ran a little ways. And then I found a piece of the arrow, like the back half of the arrow broken off. So I knew the arrow was still in him, must have hit the opposite shoulder on the other side, broken off, whatever. But I decided, well, before it gets too dark, I'm just going to keep following this blood trail. He should just be within 20, 30 yards of here. Followed a little ways and it started kind of going uphill at that point. I thought, that's really strange. But...

But I mean, you know, it's not necessarily uphill, just more level. So I thought, well, he's got to be right in this canyon. Followed it for maybe 30 to 50 more yards and there was another bed in the snow. Okay. This is weird. I mean, it wasn't making any sense to me. So I decided maybe I just push this buck out of his second bed. This isn't good. So I decided to wait a little bit longer.

And then right before dark, followed it from that second bed. I figured it should be expired by now for sure. Followed it that second bed and the track started going uphill, but it was still bleeding. At that point, I said, okay, this is stupid. I need to pull out of here and come back in the morning. So after not sleeping very well that night, watching the video, just trying to analyze that, everything still looked good.

I decided, all right, I mean, there's no reason I shouldn't find this deer. I go back the next day and pick up tracking where I left off. Luckily, it did snow a little bit, but it was just a light snow and I could still see the blood and the tracks. It was like not even a, just a light dusting. So everything was fine.

The strange thing was, is I could see where the deer bedded and then he ran up and bedded again. And I followed those tracks and he ran and bedded again. And there was blood this entire way until he got to the top. And in the beds there'd be blood, but I'd be following the tracks in the snow. Then there'd be dry spots. And then I'd catch tracks again in the snow.

Then the tracks led to another group of deer and there was just tracks everywhere. So everywhere that I found a bed, I found blood. But at this point now, I lost the blood on the tracks.

So now I'm assuming in my head, I'm like, okay, well maybe the buck I've, I've seen it happen before where the buck so rutted up. It didn't really know it was hit. They're fighting their, their testosterone levels are just super high. Maybe he got on a hot dough track and then just kind of started following this dough. And I don't know why he didn't bleed out. Maybe the hit wasn't where I thought I definitely was sure that I hit it in the lungs. So I don't know what's going on.

At this point, there's tracks going everywhere. I'm most of the way up the mountain now and I'm like, okay, now I don't know which tracks to follow. So I pick one set of tracks, follow those tracks out for a mile or whatever. Come back, find another set of tracks, follow those tracks. And there's like 30 deer tracks here. I tried to base them off of the size of the tracks and his gate, but there was other buck tracks in there. There was just a mess of deer tracks. There's some snow, there was some no snow.

It just got really difficult to track. What I thought would be walking up on this buck ended up, now it's midday. I'm like thinking I'm never going to find this deer and racking in my brain what could have happened.

I'm like thinking about, okay, I just can't give up. Just follow every set of tracks. I'd actually recorded on my phone how many I was, there's a lot of miles logged going back and forth, just walking around, finding different sets of tracks, trying to find blood. I actually found a set of tracks and there was some blood in around the tracks. And that got me on a detour for a while until I could find a good print where I could see that it wasn't obstructed and it turned out to be a doe.

So that deer just happened to have whatever scraped itself on a stick or who knows what another deer, just a couple of drops of blood that kind of took me on a detour. I get back to the bait back to where I last tracked the buck for sure. And then followed another set in a different direction. Sure enough, long story short, I end up finding the buck. Now you're probably like, well, what happened? So after analyzing what had happened, the shot looked good.

Now, after I analyzed what went on, this is the crazy part because I've never seen this happen. And this is not standard. Now, why am I telling this story about this deer on a recovery podcast? Because I think a lot of recovery, you have to play it a certain way. And I did a few things wrong in the initial setup. And then there's just bad luck. So here's the bad luck.

What had happened as I shot the deer kind of started to quarter away. Now, if I would have shot a little bit further back, it wouldn't have been a problem. I probably would have gone through both lungs. What ended up happening was the arrow hit one lung and then somehow pinned into the front shoulder on the opposite side.

at the first bed either the deer pulled it out or something the arrow had come out just part of the arrow and when i found the deer dead he had part of his lung actually outside of the cavity which plugged the hole so by plugging the entrance hole it didn't allow the lungs to collapse and then closed off the wound that's why i stopped getting blood but would get blood in

in the bed. So up until that first point, it was a blood trail like every other blood trail I followed where the deer should be gone, expired immediately. This deer, somehow its lung pulled out and closed the wound off, not allowing the lungs to collapse and not allowing it to bleed out. In which case, then it probably got on other deer tracks, continued to rut, and then made its way miles away from where it started until things got messed up again.

So I ended up actually finding the deer, but only because I just didn't give up because I knew what I saw with the shot. And I knew from the initial tracking and having tracked enough deer that that deer was going to be dead. Now, if there wasn't snow, I doubt that I ever would have found that deer and would have been going through my head. What happened? Why did I lose that deer? This doesn't make any sense. Now is luck and persistence would have it.

I ended up continuing to search because I knew what I saw and ended up recovering that deer. How you proceed after that arrow or bullet is released and impacts the animal can greatly affect your success of recovery.

Now, I want to cover a few things that I think are just imperative, including the first moves you make after making that shot. And then we'll go into a little bit of how to interpret the hit, what some of the signs on the ground as far as what different things to look for in the blood trail, as well as on your arrow.

and then just some tips on how to track and a few different scenarios. And then after that, maybe we'll kind of talk about some wait times and how to best proceed to make sure that you recover that animal. The first thing I do after I make that shot, and this is a very important and often overlooked step, is I mark where I shot from. I also take a mental note of where the animal is standing.

I'll tell myself something about specific of where it was, or I'll pull out my camera and take a picture. If you've got your phone in your pocket, take a picture of where the animal is standing.

Because you're going to probably reference that spot multiple times. I'll also remember the yardage at which the animal was. So I'll mark where I'm standing, whether it's pull something out of my pocket and tie it off, take a spare arrow and stick it in the ground. I'm going to mark where I'm standing. Now, when I'm bow hunting, even if I know I made a perfect shot...

30 minutes is my normal wait time. So I just give it time to calm down, stay quiet, don't proceed right away. Just mark where I'm at and wait.

There's a lot of reasons for that, but I think that 30 minutes with a perfect shot is a good just, yeah, it might expire in 10 or 15 minutes, whatever, but give yourself a little bit extra time. Even some guys go 45 minutes, but it just depends on a lot of factors. But I always generally go 30 minutes at the minimum. Then I'll mark where I'm at and I'll range where the animal was and then make some mental notes of where that animal is. Do that while you're waiting.

Even before I go look for my arrow or whatever. The reason for that is because once you get to the spot where you're going to be looking for your arrow, for blood, for tracks, you can range back and figure out where you were and kind of triangulate your position to get exactly where that animal is standing. The next step is now going to be look for a sign. Now, you should have a good indication of where you hit whatever you're shooting at.

But with as fast as bows are now, or maybe you're rifle hunting and you're by yourself or you don't have someone watching, it can be fairly hard to tell maybe where you hit. You might not have seen your arrow in flight. It might have been too fast. Maybe the lighting was weird. A lot of places you can use light up knocks now on your arrows, which are great, but some states still don't allow it. And if you've got a fast bow, yeah, you probably aren't going to see where your arrow hits.

So what you're going to base most of the intel on and when you're going to make your move is going to be all based on how that animal reacted at the shot. So a perfect shot would be say lungs or heart. I find that most of the time when they're shot like that, it's just a neck out straight run full speed away.

A lot of people say like if it gets heart shot, they buck. That is true. I've seen them do that though on other shots as well. Like if they get hit in the leg, that sometimes happens. But for the most part, a heart shot, they'll buck or kick and then run full speed. If you shoot a little bit further back, something like hunching up from the back might indicate that you hit too far back, maybe in the intestines, maybe in the liver.

or then anything that involves favoring a side, like favoring a leg or some kind of weird reaction that way might mean hitting it in the leg, breaking a shoulder. Those kind of body signals will be your first indication of where did you hit that animal? So if you know, shoot, it looked like I hit it back. Now you're going to want to wait longer. So let's first talk about the wait times in tracking and knowing where you hit.

If I shoot something perfect, like I said, 30 minutes. Now, if you're rifle hunting and you watch it drop or you're bow hunting and you watch it run over and fall over dead, that's completely different. This is just, if you shoot, it runs off and you don't really know, especially with a bow. With a rifle, it might be different because you might, depending on the terrain, you might be able to get a follow-up shot, especially if it just ran over rise, it's open country, get over there fast and look for it and make sure it's not running out or give yourself a good idea where it's going.

We're just going to narrow this down to bow hunting right now. If you think that you can made a perfect shot, 30 minutes is my standard wait time for shots that I know. Okay. Should just walk over there and be piled up within 20 yards. Now, if you're talking, you think you maybe hit it in the liver or made not as good of a shot. I would give it two to three hours on liver shots and then anything further back from the liver. That's six to 12 hours in my opinion.

And then you've got shots that look good and are muscle shots. And that might, if you know you hit it in a muscle, the recovery on that may not be fatal, but it might be where you could restock and refine that animal. So sometimes on that, in those particular instances, I would err on the side of tracking sooner rather than later, or at least getting to a point where I can start looking for it and then give it some time to bed down, but not get too far of a head start.

So we've marked where we shot from and we know that, okay, it looks like a good hit. So now we're going to go to where the animal was and inspect the ground, inspect the arrow. Hopefully we can find it and then proceed from there as well. So to confirm what we think we already know based on how the animal reacted from the shot.

If you can find your arrow, that's a great sign of where you made your hit. Now, a few things to think about when you pick up your arrow. Here's what you're looking for. Well, if it's gritty and bloody...

that's probably it depends on the position of the animal and how good that shot if it was quartering away hard it's gritty and then some real dark blood well you probably maybe hit some of the intestine but you probably got the liver and the lungs as well depending on how hard it was quartering away if it just has bile and green material not a lot of blood then you hit it way further back maybe in the colon

or whatever. Now, if it's just good, solid blood, like red blood, could be heart or it could be lungs. And then if you get a little bit more lighter colored blood, that's probably lungs, more like pinkish colored blood. I always tend to see on lung shots.

So if you can't find your arrow, now we're just going to have to look at the ground and what blood's there. What color is the blood? Real dark blood often indicates liver. It's almost more like a, it's a really like dark purple, almost like purple black color. A lighter color indicates lungs, especially if there's bubbles in it because that oxygen in the lungs makes it a little bit lighter colored. It's more of a pink color.

And then heart blood is more just pure red. But also you got to realize too, muscle shots can be that pure red as well. So I think a lot of people mistake a muscle hit for heart or something else. But for the most part, lungs are a lighter color, liver is that darker color.

Once you've identified, okay, where was this animal hit and verified whether your assumption is right through indications in the sign on the arrow and the sign on the ground through the blood. Now it's time to decide, okay, now do I start tracking now or do I wait even longer? If you know it's a good shot, you're like, okay, everything looked good. The signs are there. I've got light colored blood, a little bit of a bubbly blood,

there's a pretty decent blood trail. Let's follow it up right now. Now, if you think I got maybe hit the liver or even further back, now you got to go back to those standard wait times and just be patient because what you don't want to do is you don't want the animal to get pushed out of its bed because what that's going to do is it's going to keep pushing the deer or whatever further and further away and leave you smaller and smaller blood trails to follow. And you're going to be less likely to recover that animal.

Now, if it just goes to one spot, runs within 100 or so yards and beds down and then expires, you have a really good chance of finding that animal. O'Reilly Auto Parts are in the business of keeping your car on the road. I love O'Reilly. In fact, the other day, I'm not kidding you. The other day, I went into an O'Reilly Auto Parts looking for a part. I needed a different thing that wasn't really in there, you know, only like tangentially related to what they carry.

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If you know it's a fatal hit, then you're just going to follow the blood trail. The blood trail will lead to that animal. So many people get ahead of themselves. They start looking too fast and too frantic and they destroy the sign and the blood trail itself and the tracks and everything while just kind of looking around randomly.

randomly. So I always like to find the blood and then go from there because I know it's a good trail. It should lead me to the animal and they can even on good shots be very difficult to find sometimes. So what I do is I find the tracks, find where the animal was, and then depending on which side it was, the hit was on, or if you think, if you know, you got a pass through, maybe you'll see it on both sides. I start looking very carefully on all the brush around those tracks.

then what I'll do is I'll stay on the tracks and then confirm that I'm on its tracks by finding blood.

As I go and find blood, I mark it, whether it's with like a dropping a pin on onyx or I used to use toilet paper a lot or some flagging that I'll come back and get. I'll mark where the blood is because there's a lot of times where you will get off the trail. You'll start following something else that might not be that deer. You realize, OK, I got to go back to the last blood I saw and then follow that.

That is how you trail an animal. Now, the practice of it, especially on great shots, that's why you make a great shot because you don't have to blood trail something that's difficult. Most of the time, it's like a highway leading to it. It's very clear and the animal's right there within 20 or 30 yards of where you've shot.

But it's those ones where maybe something weird happens. Maybe you made a shot that the animal reacted funny. You hit in the wrong, whatever, stuff happens. But you should still be able to find whatever you hit because there should be some form of trail, tracks, blood to that animal. The key is really being patient and

and really staying on and marking and then going back and trying to find the trail. Now, once you lose the trail, what I do is I grid out from there, looking for anything, any kind of sign, track, whatever. What I will also do is pay close attention to the tracks of that animal. When it's running, how do those tracks look? What's the size of them?

There's times where I've even taken a stick and measured between the tracks. So if it gets into multiple tracks running different directions, you can sometimes tell the difference between two deer if it's not a good print based on its stride, where it might have got into a doe that's a shorter body, shorter stride, and this one's a little bit longer stride than the other one, or match those strides up.

Now there are tracking jobs where you may have made a shot that hit a muscle, hit something non-vital or something that you know might take a while. How I proceed always depends on a few things. So I've got my standard wait times, but there are exceptions for that. So if I shoot something in the evening and I know, well, it looked like a good shot, but now there's not a lot of predators around here. There's no chance of rain or snow tonight.

Most of the time, I would just leave it till the morning if it's cool out because there's no loss of meat and you know you aren't going to push it in the dark. If you shoot it in the morning, you might try to wait till afternoon. Now, if it's real hot, if it's a lot of predators in your area, if it's going to snow or rain, you may have to push those times that you would normally wait a little bit quicker.

And the reason you do that is because you know that if you leave it, there's a very low likelihood of finding it the next day where you might have a better chance of getting another shot, spotting where it's at and then waiting or some other form of kind of continuing to hunt for that animal and then hope to find it bedded still or maybe see it moving because you know that if you wait, you aren't going to find it.

And those kinds of things, you know, everything's situational when it comes to hunting, but there are some times where it's more ethical to track earlier, but most of the time it's more ethical to wait just because you won't push it.

I think that that makes a lot of sense in the moment, but it's something that I just have to talk about because there is no clear cut. This is how long you wait every time. I've been places where if you leave a deer overnight, it will be completely eaten by coyotes in the morning. And there's a lot of places like that. Or there's places where you shot something and it's going to rain.

Now, if I am hunting and I know that it's getting toward the end of light, you know, sometimes you just have to think, okay, if it's a marginal shot, if you don't have a great shot, wait, if you know it's raining or it's, it's currently raining, it's currently snowing. And you've got a shot that's like, oh, I got to make a quick shot. And it might not be that great. Don't shoot because your odds of recovering that animal go down drastically.

If you are tracking an animal, say you're tracking an animal that might not be hit that great. Maybe you think it's hitting the liver. Maybe it's hit a little bit further back, or maybe you think you might've hit it in a muscle.

you aren't sure, but it doesn't look like it's going to be immediately fatal and you have to track early. The best thing is to have two people tracking. So one person staying on the blood, the other person out using the wind and kind of hunting and looking for that animal simultaneously. So someone's following the blood while the other person is looking ahead for the deer. Because if you're constantly looking down and

at the ground tracking, and you know that there might be a chance that it might be bedded and going to jump up again, you're probably going to miss it if you're looking at the ground, analyzing sign and following a blood trail. So the best thing to do is to get another person, one person follow the blood because that's going to lead to where the animal is. And then you with your weapon ready or your bow or your shotgun or whatever you're hunting with ready,

to continue sneaking forward and kind of hunting for that animal visually, looking and following the best assumed direction that the animal went. Really the last thing that I would want to touch on for recovery of an animal, and this goes for whether you're rifle hunting or bow hunting, it doesn't matter. I see this happen a lot, is the way that people walk up on a downed animal.

Now, if you know that it's down, dead, completely awesome, great, it doesn't really matter as much. But especially with rifle shots, I've seen so many times people shoot something with a rifle. It might be spined or they hit it high and it just drops. Animals that just drop are generally the ones that get away because they wake up, they roll over, they run off, they don't leave a lot of blood behind.

So the way that I approach an animal is I always approach with the wind in my face very, very carefully. I try to position my body to where its head can't see me. And that way I can get up close enough to make sure that it's expired. I also, if it's wounded or...

had been previously wounded and down, and there's a hill, I'll always come in from the bottom as opposed to at the top from above it. So I come in from below it because that way, if it is seriously injured, it's going to be harder for it to run uphill. So it'll get up and give you a lot more opportunity to shoot again. Whereas if it's running downhill, it might run downhill fast, out of sight quickly, and not give you an opportunity for a follow-up shot.

I just wanted to really throw out a few, which is like a lot of tips on following up game animals. Most of them are going to be used when something is hit poorly. And that should not be very often because you're going to listen to the last podcast and do everything in your power to make a clean ethical kill. But there are times where things don't work right. Something happens.

Maybe you make a bad shot. Maybe the animal jumps or arrow hits a stick on flight. You just don't know. Or something crazy happens, like in the mule deer story I told, where everything should have been good, but it looked like a good shot. You did the best you could with what you thought you were aiming at, and you end up hitting one lung randomly.

And the animal goes a lot further than you think. So just keep in mind that there are ways to increase your chance of finding an animal that's hit poorly. A lot of it comes down to the time you wait and how you interpret the sign that you see at the shot, at the blood trail, and the way that animal reacts.

There is a art to tracking and you get better at it with time and with practice, just like anything else. I was actually very fortunate to have some experience going with some Bushmen in Africa that were just trackers. I mean, hundreds of generations of people that could track and their skills and abilities and the things that they picked up on.

was just uncanny. And I really tried to kind of take that into my own way of deciphering tracks and following up on animals and just understanding animals by watching them and their behaviors. And a lot of the things that they do, they probably can't explain to someone else how they do it. Because I found over the years, I've gotten so much better at finding and recovering animals for people. As a guide, you get a

a lot of experience maybe recovering something that wasn't shot that great. You know, not because it's something you did, but maybe the person shooting got way too excited and things happen. I mean, it's, it's the truth of it. Now we do everything in our power. So those things don't happen, but when they do, uh,

The way that you react and the things that you do right after the shot can make the difference. Things like marking where you're at, interpreting the shot and interpreting the sign, all that stuff is just going to be key to actually making a good recovery. So that's just something to think about when you're out there, when you have an opportunity to follow up and track something, even if you saw something just fall over.

Don't miss an opportunity. Just because you know it's dead or you made a great shot, don't miss an opportunity to go to where the animal was shot. Look at the tracks. Interpret how did it jump? Where did it go? What's the blood look like? Even on something that's fatally shot on whatever. Take every opportunity you can in the field to learn and get better at it.

I really appreciate everybody listening as always. If you get a chance, I looked through a couple of days ago and there are some incredible comments, some great comments from everybody out there about the podcast, things that they liked and some really good ratings. And I just really, really appreciate that. Like I kind of forgot to read some of them or I haven't read them in a while. And I went back and I was like, wow,

That's the reason that I'm going to keep doing this podcast. So I just want to thank everybody that's left a comment, left a rating, left a review. That means so much to me. I really do appreciate that. And if you're listening and you haven't left one or you want to leave a rating,

Go to whatever app you listen to. Drop a good rating. Leave a good comment. I just... I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. And if you don't subscribe to the podcast, definitely click the subscribe button. That way it makes it easier for you to get the new episodes as well as find them and kind of keeps the podcast going. That's the whole... As long as there's people listening, I'm going to keep doing it. So if you don't subscribe...

subscribe. I really appreciate that. So until next week, shoes straight, track well if you don't. I don't know. Maybe by our one-year anniversary in August, I will have a tagline. But until then, keep tracking.

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