Magic Bullets and Arrows

 

Nobody knows what a bullet, or an arrow, is going to do after it leaves the firing line. They think they do, but they don't; not 100 percent. Any rifleman or archer with experience will tell you that magic bullets, and arrows, exist.

Conspiracist authors, most of whom have had no practical experience with firearms themselves, book learned though they may be, like to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have killed the President, and wounded Gov. Connally with just one bullet; that somebody else had to be involved. They are wrong.

They are wrong, but I don't care. All of that is history, and the Warren Commission got it right. I just continue to be amazed at the stories I hear concerning both bullet and arrow trajectories, and the strange things that happen related to same. A story Dave Hladik told me the other day regarding his bow hunting son, Clint, put me to thinking about it.

I think I shot the first falling dead duck Clint ever saw. It fell at his feet where he was sitting in a canoe, when he was about four years old. He's forty, now, an electrical engineer down at Tinker Air Force Base, and about as avid a deer bowhunter as you will come across. Ditto, his fifteen year old son, Ty. Time marches on.

Anyway, Clint drew back on a monster buck this past week, "pinwheeled" the whopper right in the "wheelhouse" behind the shoulder, and watched it run off with the arrow protruding in the proper location. Bow killed deer seldom drop in their tracks, but, well hit, and this one was, they usually do somewhere within a hundred yards. No problem. Let's get down out of the tree, and go look.

 The buck had disappeared just over a little rise in the terrain in front of Clint's stand, and he was confident he'd find the buck only a little farther along. When he topped the rise, he immediately walked up on the arrow lying on the ground, blooded only about the first three inches of its shaft, and no buck anywhere to be seen. Hmmm. Didn't look good.

Clint "backed out," waited an hour for the deer to bleed to death, and then picked up the trail again. He found blood, spotty and thin, for about two-hundred yards, and then little, and then none at all after a quarter mile of careful searching, backtracking, and circling. Three inches of penetration will not kill a deer unless some vital vessel or artery is cut. I say the deer made it, and Clint might get another shot at the same animal this year, ironic as life is.

The arrow, by the way, was a mechanical broadhead, one of the new devices intended to open its point only on impact, causing the arrow to fly straighter with less wind and air resistance than the older type broadheads which remain open all the way to the target. This arrow opened, alright, but obviously did not penetrate nearly deep enough.

Clint has shot the old-fashioned Muzzy style broadhead all of his life; never having a problem that he wasn't personally responsible for himself. Guess what style of broadhead he is going back to. Once burned, twice learned.

My old friend, the late Jerry Sneed down in the Texas Hill Country, took up archery years ago after having been a gun hunter all his life. He went to an archery shop, got "fitted out" with a fifty-pound, wooden recurve, some arrows, practiced a little, and then stood next to cedar bush early one morning about a hundred yards from his back door.

A ten point buck walked by maybe ten yards away, Jerry drew, and fired a "clunker" right into the side of the buck's bony head, the worst possible place to arrow a deer. So hard was the buck's skull, that the arrow didn't even penetrate, but fell straight to the ground, it's point bent back upon itself by the collision with the hard object.

The deer, of course, took off like a scalded cat. Jerry walked over and picked up the arrow, and found the bent point I mentioned, two or three single hairs sticking to the point, but that was it. No blood. Well, there isn't much blood up around a deer's skull, is there?

By chance, he looked down at his feet and saw a single drop of blood no bigger than a pea. Then another, and another. Then, still another, all small like the first one, and so far apart that several times he decided to quit what appeared to be turning into a very thin blood trail. But, then he'd find another.

He found that buck an hour later, not two hundred yards from where he had hit it, and as dead as any deer he had ever killed with a rifle. The only mark on the buck was what looked like a small scratch on the side of the deer's head where the arrow had hit, and then bounced off. You tell me what that was all about.

Then there was Jarad Ballard up Hominy way, Jerry's son, that drew down on a giant, main frame ten pointer up in Osage County a few years back; held right behind the shoulder with a fifty-caliber muzzleloader, and touched the trigger. Wham! Down went the deer less than fifty yards away. Then, up jumped the deer and ran to where only God knows. Jarad didn't because there was no blood trail at all, and he searched, and searched, and searched some more.

He called everybody in his family, brothers, uncles, father and grandfather, and they all searched, hours and hours. It was a deer-gone mystery. The woods are full of them, the results of magic bullets and arrows, cursed, perhaps, by the ancient Native American spirits that still haunt this place we call home.

He would never forget the deer because of an unusual antler formation in addition to its overall size. It was stuck in his brain, and it was exactly the monster buck he killed a month later during the high power season not far from where he had first seen it. Dressing the deer, he searched for his muzzleloading bullet, and found it exactly where he expected to: on the animal's far side, and in a bulge just under the hide. A complete pass through, nearly, and through both lungs.

The court awaits your explanation, counselor. What happened?

It was a magic bullet, your Honor. I've seen them before, and arrows, too.

© 2012 Conrad M. Vollertsen