I was taught to wait 30 minutes by my
eldet relatives as a teen, but a shotgun
with buckshot was the standard deer
firearm back then, and a lot of the
hits were less than optimal
Yeah, "deer hunting" for me has always been mule deer hunting in fairly open country, and I've always used a rifle. My first "deer rifle" was/is a .308 Winchester, Model 100 Winchester.
Even at that, the first deer I shot with it, an average sized mule deer doe, ran
uphill about a hundred yards after she was well hit (through the ribs) while I put 3 more bullets through her - and you could have covered all 4 entry holes with one hand. Of course, the other side of her ribs was a different story - what a mess!

The thing was, I'd heard far too many stories from "old" guys telling me my .308 Winchester would "knock em down," and as a 15-year-old kid shooting my first deer, I was too inexperienced to know that I'd hit that deer good with my first shot, so I kept shooting until she fell down.
I'm 76 now (one of those "old" guys), and I learned a l-o-n-g time ago that sometimes deer "look like" they're "knocked down," and sometimes they run a ways even after they're well hit. Dad taught me to wait a while before trying to follow a deer that's been hit. As I said, he told me to sit down and smoke a cigarette - give the deer time to lay down and die.
Oh BTW, - I've never been a cigarette smoker, and I gave up my pipe in 2005. So, "Sit down and smoke a cigarette" has always been a kind of metaphor for "wait awhile" to me.
