You never know what you will find in a deer.

[Jeff]

This Fall I am working at a meat company in Hot Springs SD.  I took the job so I could get some experience skinning and processing wild game, and I have been learning a lot. But I wanted to share what we found in a deer the other day.

 As we were cutting up a buck, my boss noticed a lot of puss and infection along one side the backbone.  Upon further investigation he uncovered an arrow! It was lodged all the way through the back strap.  Only the head and feathers (sorry I don't know the proper term) were missing and just the shaft were left. 
The thing was, the deer was shot with a rifle, and the arrow looked like it had been there for some time.  So it must have been shot the previous year or before. 

I would not have thought that a dear could survive an injury like that.  Apparently it did not hit any vital organs and the animal was able to recover from the infection.

You just never know what you will find.

[royaltine]

My butcher has a jar full of misc. "debris" recovered form animals.  Did you see the pic I posted last year with part of an arrow lodged in the nasal passage of the skull of a whitertail buck?

[Jeff]

Yes I did.  it is amazing to me what animals can live through. 

[Steve]

Game animals are tough.  A friend of mine wounded a black bear in Alaska, while bowhunting.  It looked like the arrow had hit bone, when it ran off.  He felt really bad about that.

The next year, he hunted this same spot.  He killed a bear, with his bow, in almost the same place he had wounded the bear the year earlier.  Upon skinning and butchering that bear, he found his broadhead from the year before, buried in bone.  This was the same bear.  If I remember right it killed it on the same day he wounded it the year before.  If you ever meet, Ryan Fisher, from Ronan, ask him about that story.

I was working on the cape of an antelope this Fall, that I planned to mount.  I found an absessed place on the skin, and cut into it.  I found a 22 hollow pt. bullet.  The jacket was almost missing.  It looked like it had corroded away.  There was little or no mushroom to this bullet.  What I think happened is that someone had taken a long shot, with a 22.  The bullet had almost run out of energy when it hit the antelope.  It should have gone on to penetrate the lungs, but it only went in a short distance.  That bullet had been there a long time.  Too bad there are dipsticks out there that would take a shot like that, with too small of a gun.