When you spot your downed game, approach it slowly from behind.
When you reach the spot where you think the buck stood, tie some ribbon on a bush or tree. On the trail, mark your progress with the tape. Stay to the side of the track, so you can re-examine the prints and any blood sign.
Stick To The Facts
Avoid assumptions. Once, long ago, I shot a deer just eighty yards off in open timber. The animal ran at the shot, but I'd called a good hit through the forward ribs. After shucking another 16-gauge slug into the barrel of my Remington 870, I walked up to the track. Prints in the snow told the story. The walking deer had stopped. I'd fired. The animal had dashed away. I followed the trail at a brisk pace, certain it would be short. It led me on for 100, then 200 yards--without a speck of blood.
I traipsed back to where I'd fired, walked the same route to the site of the hit--or was it a miss? In a last-ditch effort, I circled the place where the deer had stood. A stone's toss behind it I found a parallel track, eerily identical save for a wad of hair and a peppering of scarlet in the snow. The deer lay dead fifty yards along that trail. Because the first prints had met my expectations, I'd not considered the possibility that they'd been made by another deer. Nail down the facts as soon as possible, but be mindful to keep facts and suppositions separate.
At the site of the hit, look for both blood and hair. A bullet always cuts hair, but hide can cover a bullet's entrance and hair can soak up blood from high hits, preventing blood from reaching the ground. Once, in Washington's northeast forest, I shot a whitetail. The buck ran off. I found hoof gouges but no blood. After losing the track, I returned to the site of the hit. On hands and knees I found a pink orb the size of a peppercorn. Adhering to it were a couple of fine hairs--lung.
Confident now, I followed the tracks again, then cast about in circles where the deer had slowed. I found the buck dead on a side trail, a path it had taken in its last desperate jumps.
An elk I arrowed late one evening lost very little blood from that hit, a bit far back in the ribs. As it turned and loped off, I angled a second shaft in behind the shoulder, my broadhead exiting the chest. While the blade only nicked a lung, the movement of the elk's foreleg kept that chest wound open. The next morning I found just enough blood to stay on the track for four hours and nearly a quarter-mile before losing spoor. On hands and knees, I scribed widening arcs around the last pin-spot of blood to no avail. At the point of despair I heard magpies. I homed in on the birds and found my elk, dead.
Though the author seldom trails game in the dark, he was confident this buck had dies quickly.
To recover game you must believe that you will, and be open to any clues the forest offers. If you believe, you'll muster the persistence to prevail. If you do at last abandon a track, you'll know you did everything in your power to bring the animal to bag. Fail too soon, and you define yourself as a quitter.
I've lost animals. The crippled deer Bill overtook--and missed--forty years ago was my first. The buck in the snowstorm was another. An elk I should not have shot took my arrow off into the hills. Another bull that showed me his ribs at thirty steps might have died quickly. As the shaft left the string, he stepped forward to reach a sprig of grass. My arrow struck a hand's breadth too far back. Hunters who have never lost an animal can be proud. It's a difficult record to maintain.
Timing Is Everything
Trailing technique not only determines what you see but can also affect your chances of catching up with an animal still mobile. Arrow-hit game sustains no debilitating shock. Dogging the animal too soon or too close can push it beyond where it would otherwise bed. An hour's wait gives internal hemorrhage time to take its toll. Rifle-shot animals, in my view, are best followed right away. A bullet wound that's not lethal may cause enough discomfort to prompt the animal to bed, but that's most likely to happen far from the impact site.
Time dries blood and brings darkness closer. Don't expect an ailing animal to stop before it reaches a secure hide with wind and visual coverage of its back-trail. Paunched game often heads for water--but that may be far away. I once followed a client's badly-shot elk until blood vanished. Four days later, on a hunch, I eased over a ridge a mile from that place and glassed a seep in a brushy canyon. An elk lay bedded. I urged my client to negotiate the steep face and brought him to within killing range of the bull. The freshly shattered hip confirmed my suspicions.
