One aspect of hunting that still intrigues me, is that the more you hunt, the more you learn. And you will never be done learning.

I almost learnt the hard way on a recent red deer hunt. I set myself up for a perfect situation with two red deer in front of me at around 60 meters. A doe and a hind grazing right in front of me, I was calm, sitting down and my rifle was steady in a Stony Point Rapid Pivot shooting stick. I fired a shot at the doe as seen in the photo below, and the doe fell dead to the ground just meters away.

Now I had an opportunity to also shoot the hind. After I had shot the doe, the hind ran only about 100 meters away, turned around and slowly approached be again. After about 10 minutes the hind was standing still at around 75 meters and I placed what I thought at that point was a perfect shot. And this is where the learning kicked in – or rather the lesson learnt. I thought I’d made a perfect shot, after all, I shot the doe just minutes away at 60 meters, and now, with a larger hind at 75 meters, I trusted my shooting skills to be good enough to see the hind fall to the ground as well. This is where I was wrong, and this is when I should have made my second shot.

For reasons I still don’t understand, the first shot at the hind was a bad one. It was obviously hurt, but still standing. While I did have enought time and the animal perfectly placed in my scope, I doubted for too long, waited for it to fall over, rather than shooting it again. This was when I had my lesson learnt.

I eventually was able to kill the hind after what seemed like an endless persuit across the field and amongst some trees. I could have – and should have – saved the animal for the additional suffering and saved myself from the additional stress simply by shooting one more time.

So the lesson learnt is this – when in doubt, shoot again!