Since the buck was wounded at midmorning, there was still plenty of daylight left, so we decided to back off for several hours before continuing to track the deer. When we returned, we found a second bed that the whitetail had vacated before we backed off. As darkness neared, we crossed a logging road, so we left the track again, returning first thing the next morning.

The next morning, we found the buck dead after trailing him another quarter mile. He was dead before we left the track the previous evening. He had died on his feet, walking until he could go no more. The buck covered at least two miles after being wounded.

The deer had been angling away when Bruce shot him. His round ball entered the right ham, punctured the paunch and had nicked the liver. The presence of snow is absolutely necessary for recovery of bucks under these types of circumstances because there was no blood trail.

The recommended procedure for recovering leg-hit bucks is totally opposite from the strategy for recovering gut-shot deer. What you want to do to increase your chances of securing leg-hit whitetails is to push them. The key is to keep the wound open and bleeding. Blood loss will eventually weaken the deer enough to allow a finishing shot.

If a leg is broken, large bone fragments may be visible at or near where the deer was standing. The femoral artery extends into the lower portion of each of a whitetail's hind legs, so a shot that severs this artery can prove to be fatal. Bright red muscle blood is most often associated with these types of wounds. There's often a lot of blood at first, but blood loss usually diminishes gradually.

A whitetail wounded in a hind leg or ham is easier to recover due to the presence of plenty of blood vessels than those on which a front leg is broken. Hairs on the front legs of deer are much finer and shorter than anywhere else on their anatomy. If a leg is broken, you should be able to determine that from a buck's tracks in the snow.

The injured leg may be dragging. If a front leg is broken, whitetails often run on three legs. When trying to recover a buck with a leg hit, it's a good idea to try to enlist the help of other hunters who might be able to get a shot at the deer ahead of you. That can cut short what otherwise might be a long trailing effort.

I have snow tracked some whitetails with leg hits for days before finally getting them. Tenacity and persistence are sometimes required to finish what was started in these cases, but the effort is worth it. There's no greater satisfaction than tagging a wounded whitetail after a long, drawn-out recovery.

Some hunters are obviously not as persistent as they should be when it comes to recovering leg-hit bucks. Bruce and I have both tagged deer with broken legs that were wounded by other hunters that they didn't pursue far enough, even though there was snow on the ground. One of them was a wide-antlered 9-pointer.

For more information on this subject, refer to the author's book, Tracking Wounded Deer. Ordering information about this title and other books by the author can be found on his Web site at www.richardpsmith.com.