After The Shot: What Really Happens in the Minutes That Matter Most

Aug 03, 2026

After The Shot: What Really Happens in the Minutes That Matter Most

The shot's gone off, the animal's bolted, and for a few seconds you're just standing there — half-convinced you smoked it, half-convinced you didn't. I've been in that exact spot more times than I can count over twenty-five years of hunting. What happens in the next sixty seconds, the next hour, sometimes the next few days, matters just as much as the shot itself.

After The Shot title graphic with post-shot tracking icons

After the shot: the playbook that follows every release. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

Treat It Like a Crime Scene

The first thing I do, always, is knock another arrow — or chamber another round if you're shooting a rifle. Quietly. There's no point spooking an animal that has no idea it's been hit by fumbling around ten metres from it.

From there, it's about staying dead silent and watching. A well-placed heart or lung shot usually means the animal runs somewhere between fifty and a hundred metres and drops — and if you're quiet, you'll often hear it happen. Watching how the other animals in the mob react is one of the most underrated skills in this whole process.

One thing worth being properly paranoid about: mistaken identity. If there are other animals still in view, don't assume the one you're looking at is necessarily the one you shot — I've seen two separate chital stags get shot out of the same mob because of exactly this mix-up, and the same happens with feral pigs. Confirm your original animal is down before considering a follow-up shot on anything else. This matters even more when meat care or a cape is on the line, since hair slip and spoilage don't wait around.

An animal breaking into a run after being alerted

The moment after a shot — watch, don't chase. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

Record Everything, Immediately

Get your phone out and record your thoughts right then and there. Where exactly was the animal standing? Was it truly broadside, or slightly quartering? How far away? The longer you wait, the more your memory starts second-guessing itself.

I take it a step further now — a quick photo from my exact shooting position, and I drop a GPS pin the second I take the shot, then another where I believe the hit occurred. From that first pin, I switch on the tracking feature on my phone too, so everywhere I walk from that point gets logged.

If you're filming, watch the footage back before doing anything else — it's the best thing about recording our hunts, a genuine third-party referee to check your read of the shot against. Ask yourself plainly: is the line to where you think the animal was actually clear, or is there a chance you clipped a branch on the way through?

Dropping a GPS pin on a hunting app right after the shot

A dropped pin at the shot site saves hours of second-guessing later. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

Finding the Evidence

Once you move in, you're a forensic investigator. I'm looking for one of three things: the arrow, tracks, or that first spot of blood. I run white fletching on my arrows specifically so I can read the blood pattern on them clearly.

If you're tracking with a mate, get disciplined here — one person leads, one follows and stays patient, rather than peeling off to "just check over here." When I find blood, I drop a pin in the exact spot rather than relying on my walking track alone. I'll also mark the trail with visual aids at head height — biodegradable toilet paper is my usual choice, though synthetic tape or flagging needs to be pulled back out of the bush once the job's done.

Ayden Doumtsis holding a blood-marked broadhead after a shot

First evidence: the arrow itself tells you most of the story. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

When There's No Arrow and No Blood

Sometimes the arrow stays inside the animal rather than passing through, acting almost like a plug — a genuinely lethal hit can still produce minimal to no blood trail for a surprising distance. Two holes, entry and exit, will nearly always bleed more than one, and a three-blade broadhead behaves differently to a two-blade in how readily the wound seals. On thick-skinned animals — boars with their fighting shield, buffalo with their heavy hide — a fatal wound can close over and give you almost nothing to follow despite the animal being mortally hit. None of this means the shot missed; it just means working the ground even harder for tracks and any sign at all.

Blood pooled deep in dry leaf litter, easy to miss

Easy to walk straight past — blood buried in leaf litter. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

Reading the Blood Trail

Is it bright and frothy with tiny bubbles? That's a great sign — lungs. Dark, thick, and bubble-free? Could mean muscle or bone. Watery and off-colour? Often gut or liver. Blood smeared at shoulder height on brush, not just on the ground, can tell you as much as the ground trail itself.

The medium matters too — leaves and broad, dry vegetation hold a trail far better than fine green stems. In dry conditions blood can crust up and look like old sap within minutes; in heavy rain, a trail can wash away almost entirely. I've learned to touch it: fresh blood stays tacky while still runny; once truly dry, you lose that. Fallen logs and obstacles an animal has to jump are worth checking closely — that's often where a wound reopens.

As a vet, I've drawn up one millilitre of red dye in a syringe and sprayed it across a wall — it looks like a murder scene. But an animal's blood volume sits at roughly 8% of its bodyweight, so a hundred-kilo boar carries around eight litres, and losing 10% of that is enough to cause serious shock. Don't let a dramatic-looking trail fool you into false confidence or false despair — read the pattern, not just the volume.

The single most important point on any blood trail is the first place the animal actually stops. With a true heart or lung shot, that's usually where you find them. But if you reach an obvious pool with no animal there, that tells you one of two things: the animal made a conscious decision to keep moving, or it was about to bed down and die and got bumped before it could. Either way, that's the moment to stop, reassess, and consider giving more time.

A blood-marked leaf held up for inspection

Leaves hold a trail far better than fine green stems. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

When the Shot Wasn't Textbook

Shots too far forward — shoulder, leg bones, neck — often produce a lot of bright, thick blood with no bubbles, sometimes with meat or bone fragments in the trail, and the animal frequently travels a hundred metres or more before the trail thins from a steady line to a splatter, then droplets, then nothing. These shots can still be lethal, and sometimes aren't — I've heard of red deer disappearing into thick country for a week and walking back out having recovered.

Shots too far back — gut or liver — behave differently. The blood is darker, more watery, and the animal will often travel and then bed down, sometimes taking hours to succumb. This is where patience is everything. A second shot is only worth taking if you're genuinely confident you can place it humanely — otherwise, pushing a marginal hit too early can cost you the animal, and the meat, entirely.

Close-up of a wound site in an animal's coat

Where the shot actually landed changes everything that follows. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

Knowing When to Call It

Giving up after one lap around the hillside isn't good enough. Gridding a search area systematically, using that phone tracking line, genuinely works. Animals often run downhill when wounded, and are frequently found near water in the days that follow as blood pressure drops. Smell, and birds circling a spot, can also give away a carcass. Sometimes the only real closure comes from returning the next day, or even a week later.

Blood trail scattered across sand and leaf litter

Gridding a search area beats one hopeful lap of the hillside. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

The Bit That Actually Matters Most

All of this boils down to one thing: we owe these animals our full effort and our honesty about our mistakes. If a shot goes sideways, the answer is to relax more next time, know your anatomy cold, and remember we don't have to shoot every animal that gives us the opportunity. Cut up and process every animal you take yourself if you can, so you genuinely know where the heart and lungs sit and what your gear can and can't handle. If you're consistently losing animals, that's a signal to rethink your approach — join a club, hunt with someone more experienced, change your gear, or take a break and go back to photographing animals for a while.

We've made plenty of mistakes over twenty-five years of hunting between James and me. If sharing them honestly helps even one person find one animal they might otherwise have lost, then this has done its job.

An arrow in the foreground with a hunter approaching in the distance

Closing the loop. Image by Ayden Doumtsis

FAQ: Is Gassy Meat Still Safe to Eat?

A listener wrote in after hitting a deer a little further back than planned, and by the time he found it, the carcass had already started to bloat. The honest answer: case by case, and if in doubt, don't take the risk.

It's normal for the gastrointestinal tract to expand and turn gaseous fairly quickly. My rule of thumb is to avoid anything that was in direct contact with the guts or had high blood flow near the internal organs. I'd go straight for the back legs — avoiding the chest cavity — and the backstraps, and honestly, that's probably all I'd take. Work fast: pull the muscle groups off the hindquarters quickly, let them air-dry, and remove the bone so the meat cools faster. If anything smells or looks off, leave it — not worth getting sick over, and a useful lesson for next time.