Time allows a wound to weaken and kill the animal. Photo by Mitch Kezar/ Windigo Images.

Many deer hunters think tracking and recovering a big buck that's wounded when there's snow on the ground is a piece of cake. It depends on where the whitetail was hit. If the animal is solidly hit through the lungs or heart with a bullet or broadhead, recovery can be a cakewalk, even without snow.

It's the less than perfect hits that test the skill and persistence of the most dedicated deer hunters, even when snow is on the ground. As an example, consider a big 8-pointer my brother, Bruce, shot with a round ball from an iron-sighted muzzleloader during December one year when there was about a foot of snow on the ground. When he fired, the buck dropped. Since he was aiming for the shoulder to take out the lungs, he assumed that's where the ball hit, so he didn't bother reloading.

Imagine his shock a minute or two later when the whitetail got back on his feet and took off as though there was nothing wrong with him. Bruce was reloading the frontloader when I reached him. I had been hunting nearby and knew it was him who shot, so I went to see what he got.

After examining the scene, it was apparent his shot had gone high, striking the buck high in the back. How we could make that determination is there were gobs of hair from the top of the back near where the whitetail had been when Bruce shot.

A grazing hit typically knocks clumps of hair from a deer rather than individual strands commonly associated with a solid body hit.

The hairs from the top of a whitetail's back are very distinctive. Roughly half the lengths of the hairs, starting at the tip, are black. The color, shape and length of hairs on a whitetail's body actually vary enough that it's possible to verify the location of any hit by examining the resulting hairs. You have to study the differences in hair from parts of a deer's anatomy, though, to make that possible, which is something I have done.

Another clue that Bruce had made a grazing hit on the buck was the lack of blood. Solid body hits, especially in the chest, usually, but not always, generate a steady blood trail that's easy to see on the snow.

So, through detective work, we determined the deer was stunned by the shot, but far from down for the count. A factor that complicated recovery of this particular whitetail is there were many deer in the area and there were tracks everywhere. Without a solid blood trail, how were we going to be able follow the particular buck my brother shot and distinguish his tracks from those of other deer?

I studied the tracks that we knew were made by the buck to look for any unique characteristics in prints from each hoof. Chipped or broken hooves often stand out. Big bucks usually leave big tracks, too, and their size is often enough to distinguish them from other deer.