After watching the buck struggle from only 60 yards away, Olson thought about putting it out of its mystery. But first, he called a local game warden.
“I wanted to make sure what I was going to do would be legal,” Olson says. “I had my bow tag with me but didn’t have my bow, so I called up a buddy that lived nearby and he brought me his bow. I shot [the living deer], tagged it, and the game warden gave me a salvage tag for the dead one.”
When Olson approached the pair, he realized the 8-pointer had been dead for some time. The back half of the carcass had been eaten away, and its hide had started turning green. The buck’s eyes were pecked out, and the whole carcass stunk with rot.
Olson took all the salvageable meat from the 13-pointer but had to leave some behind due to all the blood (from the exploded vessels) that had saturated the muscles. He dropped off the bucks, still locked up, with a taxidermist in the area. He plans to turn the pair into a double shoulder mount.
While the experience was a unique one, especially for Olson’s first archery buck, he also sleeps a little better at night knowing that he sought the game warden’s guidance on the situation.
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“He was initially shocked. He sounded as surprised as I was on the phone,” Olson says. “But he said ‘Either you shoot it with your bow and tag it or we come out there and try to break them apart.’ And I knew I wasn’t going to pass up that opportunity … Some folks, I’ll call them ‘haters,’ said this wasn’t fair chase. But I know what shape the deer was in, and even if they would have broken him free, he probably would have died anyway. He was getting skinny and had a hole in his head, and probably had a fever from getting so worked up.”