Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

Mosquitoes buzzed in and out of my ear incessantly as I waited for the sun to go down on this early October evening. It was hot. It was humid. If it weren’t the second day of my state’s archery deer season, I would have been sitting in my air-conditioned house. Instead, there I was perched in my tree stand on the side of a hill in a suburban wood lot.

Nothing moved until just before quitting time. That’s when I saw a doe come barreling past me, heading from a thicket on my right to a stream downhill to my left. Within a few seconds after the doe had passed, a buck came plodding along her trail with his nose to the ground. And it was a good buck -- a wide-racked 9-pointer.

I stood up in my stand, grabbed my bow off a hook in the tree, and readied myself for a shot. When the buck was 30 yards out, he turned off the doe’s trail and began walking directly toward me.

As the buck drew nearer, I hoped he would turn off to one side or the other so I could get a broadside shot, but he didn’t. He walked directly to the base of my tree and then began sniffing around. In that heat, I knew he was picking up my scent, left on the ground when I climbed into my stand.

The buck started to tense and I felt certain he was going to bolt. I drew back my bow, leaned out at a hard angle over my stand and drilled him right between the shoulder blades, severing his spinal cord. The buck fell where he stood.

Had I not regularly practiced that shot over the preceding months, I don’t think I ever would have taken it. However, I knew I could make it. I knew where to aim. In addition, I knew what the results would be.

UNPREDICTABLE SHOTS
Play the bowhunting game long enough and you’re sure to encounter some funky shots. What do I mean by that? Well, ones that aren’t 20 yards broadside, with perfect light and no obstructions between you and the deer. Sure, this is what you’re supposed to wait for, but in real life, such shots aren’t always offered.

Was I going to pass on my straight down shot at a Pope and Young 9-pointer just because it wasn’t the “perfect” bowhunting shot? No way! If you’re prepared, you can make bowhunting’s impossible shots. Let’s take a look at some of those shots.

STRAIGHT DOWN
Since I opened this article with it, we might as well start out by mentioning the straight down shot. There’s no doubt that this is a tricky shot. And unless you practice it, you shouldn’t take it. Why?

When you’re shooting straight down, the only vital organ that’s really exposed is the heart. You’ll be shooting between the lungs at this angle. You might catch one lung, but that’s a slow-kill hit. Slice through one lung, and you better let that deer go for a minimum of four hours before taking up the trail.

So, you have a direct line to the heart, which is positioned low but in the center of the chest cavity. The problem is, there’s a lot of bone guarding it from directly overhead. You really have to thread the needle to get an arrow past the shoulder blades, ribs and spine.

This brings us to the main target of this shot -- the spine. Just nick a deer’s spinal cord and he’s going down on the spot. No tracking required. Hitting a deer in the spine is a bowhunter’s dream because it eliminates the need for tracking, but the only shot angle that makes the spine a legitimate target is when you’re shooting straight down. That’s because you can tell exactly where your target is -- dead center between the shoulder blades.