I'm sorry this is so long, but please bare with me. My 14 year old daughter and I were hunting a farm this morning when she shot a nice 8 pointer. The deer was quartering towards us and she hit it behind the shoulder, so I suspected a one lung, liver and gut hit. The deer was obviously hit very hard though, as he only ran about 40 yards before laying down in plain view by a fence. We could see him from the jawline up, but really didn't have a shot. He wasn't going to live long like that, so we waited. A minute or so after the shot, two coyotes came down the fence line where the buck was bedded and attacked him. The buck jumped up, hopped the fence and ran away with both yotes right on him.
A few minutes later we decided to take up the blood trail that went about 150 yards, ending at the shoreline of a 5 acre pond. The buck was nowhere to be found, nor could we find any more blood. After searching all around for four hours, my daughter and I were tired, thrashed from briars, disheartened, frustrated and just bummed. It was over and an easy recovery had morphed into something I've never seen or heard of in decades of hunting. As we were leaving, I drove to the far side of the pond to take one more look from a different angle Unbelievably, I saw something through my binoculars way out in the middle of the pond, about 200 yards away. It was the buck, dead and stuck floating on top of the aquatic weeds that choked the shallow pond. As the light and clouds moved, the glare on the pond went from highlighting the buck to completely hiding it. We were elated! It took two hours of very hard, cold and wet work to recover that buck, but we did it. My daughter stuck with it through it all and we had an experience we'll never forget.
