Deer are tough

I process a lot of deer for other people so I get to see some strange stuff. This the the femur (thigh bone) from a large buck that was brought to me by my neighbor. He shot it with the bow. As soon as I started to de-bone the hind quarters I notice something was wrong. I removed all the meat from the bone and boiled it out. As I was scraping off the meat. I heard a metallic sound in my sink. I found one blade from a broadhead. This buck had been hit in the hind quarter a year earlier and lived to be shot a year later by another bow hunter. After looking at the bone, it appeared that there might be more of the head still in the leg and that the bone had grown over it so I took it to work and we scanned it. It turned out that there was no other parts of the head within the bone. This tuff deer made it through the remainder of the archery season and then WI's gun deer season and a cold WI winter and did this with a compound fracture. This is a tuff animal.

Here is an image a friend sent me of a deer that lived to be shot my a gun hunter who discovered this sight when he was gutting the buck. It just goes to show you that if you do not hit a bleeder. That deer will probably live.

And another from what I can only hope was an accidental impact. This deer also lived to be harvested by a gun hunter.