Longest it took you to find/track down your game after shooting it?

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Patriots

New member
I wanted to know what's the longest it took and farthest you guys had to walk to track down your game after shooting it with a bullet or arrow? Blood trail or no blood trail. And if you had any crazy or weird interesting experiences in that scenario?

For me personally I'm up here in New England and we mostly got white tail deer to hunt and there's been a couple times after hitting a deer with my Weatherby 300 with 180gr Barnes bullet from 200 yards+ and beyond after a clean through and through shot that it ran off and I lost it, I spent hours looking for it and looking for a blood trail but I kept losing the trail because it was a November fall cloudy rainy day, and everytime I'd think I saw some blood on the ground it was a red/brown leaf on the ground. I was getting very frustrated and talking out loud to myself so I left and called a friend and he brought along 2 of his buddies so we had 4 of us out there looking for this damn deer. We eventually found it, I had no idea how long it was dead. I shot the deer at around 8am and we didn't find it till around 4:45pm and it was dusk, getting a little dark out. Here in New England towards end of November the days are short, it gets dark fast. So we were lucky.
 
This is why I'm excited about taking my new S&W 500 hunting next time using Winchester Platinum Tip 400gr hollow points or Corbon Hunter S&W500 385gr soft points. I'm looking for more shock and knock down power even if it damages a little more of the meat.
 
Furthest was a butt shot pig a buddy of one shot with a .308 in the middle of the night from inside his truck while the sow was runnin' full tilt. We looked and let my pitbull I had to catch pigs try the blood trail but he lost it after a dozen yards into the thicket. Found her dead a week later a few yards deeper in. But a dead hog is a good hog... no one lost sleep.
Brent
 
All about shot placement. The most I've had any deer run was about 100 to 150 yards. My buck this year actually made one big leap and was done.

Just curious Patriot - where did you hit your deer?
 
I arrowed a deer in the liver once, took 4 hours & 400 yards for it to die. Waited 2 hours, started tracking, spooked it up & had to stop because it got right next to a residence when it made its last standing, about 75 yards from us...we sat, waited and watched, till it finally expired an hour and a half later. I felt terrible but it happens like that sometimes.
 
Call me a meat waster but I keep shooting 'til they're down... had one make it 50 yards or so once after two to the boiler room, third (gut shot on the run) was the end. I am neither an experienced tracker nor on enough property to know they won't be two farms away if I let them run out - I am going to make a sure thing of it after I pull the trigger the first time.
 
I had a buck go about 1/2 mile after I hit behind its lungs by about 2 inches. We had to get a couple of kids to track it for us. Those boys walked along that trail like it was a neon sign. We couldn't see a thing. Every now and then they'd say "Don't you see that blood?" and point to a drop the size of a pencil lead on a leaf. They told us it's because they're American Indian that they can track that way. (no joke) I don't know if that's why but those boys sure can track. Anyhow, it's was the next morning we found him so it was only about 14 hours.
 
This is why I'm excited about taking my new S&W 500 hunting next time using Winchester Platinum Tip 400gr hollow points or Corbon Hunter S&W500 385gr soft points. I'm looking for more shock and knock down power even if it damages a little more of the meat.
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Hate to say it, but if you don't hit 'em right, it won't make any difference.

If you hit them right, a .357 mag will drop them just about as quick.

We tracked a mule deer once that my dad hit with an arrow. It went a couple of miles, but we found it the next morning. He got a bit of one lung, but it didn't leave much of a blood trail.

Every animal that I ever hit right, no matter what I hit it with, dropped in sight. I make it a point to make the first shot count, but like another poster said, if it's still on it's feet then I'll likely shoot it again if I have the chance.

Tracking is a hunting skill that a lot of folks need to learn more about. In fact, it's a continual learning process for me.

Daryl
 
Hate to say it, but if you don't hit 'em right, it won't make any difference.
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Can't stress that enough.

I've heart-shot two deer and neck-to-spine'd another. They didn't take a step. Double-lunged deer have received follow-up shots, but never went far (the above story was the farthest). If you hit heart, or lungs close to it, they'll flop. Get your range time in!
 
Longest for me was an arrow. My first bow kill.

Shot was uphill, quartering away, about 35 yards and I slipped it back just an inch from a perfect shot. Sliced an intestine and put a perfect X (ok, it wasn't an X, because it was a 3-blade broadhead...) through the liver and took out the off-side lung and buried into the bank behind it.

Took us about 2 hours to find it. First problem was it was raining buckets, so I did not wait as long as I would have normally. Second problem, only discovered when we found it, was a loop of intestine had dropped into the entrance wound like a cork. All the blood stayed inside after the first few yards.

Only way we found it was from the last drop of blood we started a grid seach in the direction of travel when last seen. Found it piled up under some brush about 100 yards from the shot.

I have been in on track jobs that ran into days on animals others had shot (poorly). Nothing like wasting precious days of your season trying to find an elk that was hit by someone else.
 
I have shot a deer with 06 & it run 100 yrds Heart shot/same whith 243 droped in tracks /Just some deer have more will to live or HEART:D
 
I have shot a deer with 06 & it run 100 yrds Heart shot/same whith 243 droped in tracks /Just some deer have more will to live or HEART
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I honestly think it has to do with what stage of breathing they are in at the moment of the hit. If they are just about to exhale then they essentially have an entire breathe to live on, if they just exhaled and haven't inhaled they have NO breathe to live on.
Just this Sunday my hunting party experienced 2 nearly identical shots on 2 very similar deer. My shot was about 35 yards on a 4-point. Double lung and heart. He jumped, jogged about 35 yards and fell. An hour later, my cousin shot a 6-point at about 45 yards. Double lung and heart. He ran full bore but only got about 75 yards. The difference? Well, his ran, mine jogged, both lived maybe 6 seconds.
I think that if you hit the heart then the brain has only the oxygen it already got to live on. If you hit the lungs but not the heart then the brain gets the remaining oxygen in the blood stream plus however much can still be gleaned from the damaged lungs, which depends on the breathing stage they are in.
 
Longest Distance? Or Longest Time? :confused:

Longest time:
The first buck I ever killed was a 40 yard broadside shot, .270, Remington 130 gr Coreloct bullet. put it right in his heart. He was unfortunately standing right on the edge of one of the nastiest, thickets, briar patches I have ever seen. At the shot, he dove in the thicket, I heard him "crash" four times, then nothing. At the spot o fthe shot, I found three tiny drops of blood.....nothing else, anywhere....took most of the afternoon to find him laying less than 30 yards into the thicket. shot him right through the heart but the exit wound was ony the size of a dime.......

Longest Distance:
First hangun kill. Doe. 60 yards. T/C COntender with open sights. 44 Magnum Super 14" barrel. Can't remember the exact load now, but it was a copper jacketed lead flat nosed bullet......anyway, the Doe was quartering toward me about dusk....Shot her, she did one of those nice
"cartwheels" letting me know I had a good hit, then got up and dove right over the side of the ridge top I was hunting on. Sat in the stand, smoked a Camel or too, then decied to go pick up my deer.....figured she was right on the other side of the brush at the edge of the clearing, so I left everything sitting there at my stand except my knife.....all the way to the bottom of the hill, into a dry creak bed, and about a mile and a half away from my stand I finally found her, and had to finish her off. My shot was too far back in the rib cage, and angled to the off hip, so it was a nice "gut shot".........unfotunately, by the time I finished gagging while field dressing it, darkness had fall, with my flashlight and radio a mile and a hlf back up hill. Drug that deer out in the dark with only my zippo to light the way.......
 
I honestly think it has to do with what stage of breathing they are in at the moment of the hit. If they are just about to exhale then they essentially have an entire breathe to live on, if they just exhaled and haven't inhaled they have NO breathe to live on.
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Naw. It actually has more to do with the way the bullet acts when it hits. Fragile bullets will do more damage in the distance they penetrate, while stronger built bullets will penetrate deeper to reach vital organs on larger animals.

Animals drop from blood pressure loss far quicker than from loss of oxygen to the brain. You can hold your breath longer than the 6 seconds it took for those deer to die, and you'd still be very much alive.

A person can choke on something, and still stay alive for several minutes without oxygen. If blood pressure drops though, they hit the ground. Without blood pressure, you lose the flow of blood, and it's all over.
 
Animals drop from blood pressure loss far quicker than from loss of oxygen to the brain. You can hold your breath longer than the 6 seconds it took for those deer to die, and you'd still be very much alive.

A person can choke on something, and still stay alive for several minutes without oxygen. If blood pressure drops though, they hit the ground. Without blood pressure, you lose the flow of blood, and it's all over.
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Entirely possible that your right. I never thought of the blood pressure angle. The part that makes me wonder is that a double lung that misses the heart still causes death in a matter of seconds. That doesn't seem to be blood pressure related. When you hold your breathe you still have the entirety of the oxygen in that amount of air. When the lungs are damaged you lose most, if not all, of that air.
 
That doesn't seem to be blood pressure related
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It might be (I am not a Doctor, and did not stay at...). The amount of blood flowing to the lungs is huge and as that blood exits the circulatory system, it might cause the blood pressure crash.
 
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