Loyalist Dave
Member
But no, one can never "know" the difference with absolute certainty anymore than one can know the difference with a standing deer missed for any number of reasons. Speaking of such reasons, the only deer I've ever lost with a rifle was standing stock still, but a small, unseen twig intervened in the trajectory to send my bullet slightly off course. I found the twig after some searching as I couldn't understand the lack of DRT on a square shoulder shot with a good call on the break at relatively close range inside 100 yards.
Thanks for the explanation and the lesson. Where I hunt the cover is thick even after the leaves fall, and my shots are normally well under 100 yards. The deer creep in or slowly walk in, and may stop and stand, so that when I fire, the deer normally react by dashing off, or sometimes some will stand and stare while others dash off, but you don't see them long enough after they are hit, to tell if they have changed their movement behavior. (Unless of course as you mentioned it was a shoulder shot, and they dropped like they were pole-axed on the spot.) So I may hear a crashing in the woods that indicates the deer has likely "piled up", but I never see them stumbling about. The one I shot in October of this year took off like I'd poked her in the arse with a burning twig for the brief moment I saw her before she went deep into the brush
Also like you I fired at a standing deer, and she scampered off. No blood at all, and I couldn't believe I'd missed her at under 50 yards. Though try as I might, I found foot prints but absolutely no blood trail. I was very concerned that somehow I'd made a bad shot..., and the deer was barely wounded...but still I thought there should've been some blood. After an hour of slowly criss-crossing her path, I went back to where I was when I fired, to begin "from the top" and of course as the day had progressed by an hour, the sun had moved, and things were revealed that I had not seen before. The base of a small maple, that was just behind the deer when I had fired, was quite torn up, and my bullet was lodged in that tree. A clean miss (I was relieved) but then the question was why..., and then I found the small twig that I'd not seen when firing nor when I first tried to track the deer...which had deflected my shot. Well...at least I hadn't wounded a deer that got away.
LD