Worst Drag EVER

[Tony 270]

Think it was four years ago. Found a forky at the top of a hill, but he saw me around the same time. Down the hill he goes. And down... and down. When looking at this slope from the side and at distance, it looks about 45 degrees. It is steep. I knew that at the time and was looking at this buck going down to the bottom, about 300+ yards, and asked myself if I really wanted to shoot him. I had the scope on him, was questioning if it was worth it, and BOOM! Somehow, with three broken ribs on impact, 1/3 of his heart missing, one lung destroyed, and a broken off shoulder he was able to take off at full speed. Only lasted about 30 yards before he dropped as fast as he took off. Went down there and found him. Looked up and knew I had a long pack to the top. Carried my gear about 50 yards up, went back for him. Luckily he wasn't that big or heavy so I picked him up, over my shoulders, and carried him towards the top. Could only make it about 50 yards before I had to drop him and sit there catching my breath for about 10 minutes. Grabbed my gear, went up about 50 yards, back down for him... repeat. And repeat, and repeat, and... lol. It sucked.

[yelp]

I had some hairy drags..but my worst was up in the Sinlahekin.  Shot a nice three point Muley.  I tagged and  gutted him and started my drag down the mountain.  I get down almost to the bottom and its all cliff box canyon to the trail.  I cut deer in half and toss bottom over the cliff 100' to bottom and take front quarters down some goat trail to bottom.  I then realize I am missing something..My weapon is up at the top of the *%@$#$# mountain by the gutpile.  I leave everything.. get to the top of mountain and recover my weapon..now its dark..I get back down to the goat trail and slip fall down skin up my leg.  I am ok but sore.  I grab the front quarters and head out..I run out of water...I find a pond and sip water from it..rinse and spit. I then hoofed it out the trail to county rd.  I then realize I was still three miles from my vehicle.  Its sunday night ...I have to work in the morning and I have a meeting in Omak in the AM.  I had to drive home Coulee City..get my work truck clean up..put in a change of clothes..eat some food..sleep 2 hours..drive back up walk in to where the rear quarters were..pack those out and make my meeting at 8:30 am. After that hunt I don't drag anymore if I don't have too..LOL  This is how I roll now!

[bow4elk]

yelp, don't tell me that thing gets use in turkey camp too    I love it!

[yelp]

yelp, don't tell me that thing gets use in turkey camp too    I love it!

Almost as good as a badlands pack..LOL  Only the turkeys I shoot..I usually have to quarter mine!  LOL

[strutnrut1984]

Wacked a decent 4x4 whitetail back in pa one year with the bow. Climbed down outta my stand. Went and got some dinner and did chores came back in an hour and started to track. He went 70yards and I came to the edge of our 13 acre lake.I'm like no way.so back home I go for the spotlight. Sure enough in the middle of the lake floats the buck. So here I am 10 pm trying to find a boat of some kind.so finally I get ahold of a buddy with a 8 ft johnboat.12am now we launch the boat by this time the deer had sunk finally after another hour of searching we locate it about 2 ft under the surface. Then trying to snag it with a rope lol.finally did . Then trying to drag a submerged deer owith a rowboat to shore thru weeds and lilly pads not fun. 330am now back at the house.so I guess u could say my worst drag ever lol.

[Pathfinder101]

Worst drag for me was a buck my buddy shot down in a canyon on the backside of Mingo Mountain near Kettle Falls when I was a Junior in high school.  He drilled this nice 5X6 whitetail on opening morning right at the edge of some private property.  Downhill was the private property, uphill was Boise land.  We went down to the farmhouse to ask if we could drag the deer downhill thru his land (we knew the guy), but no one was home, so....
Uphill we went. 
First we tried to drag him whole (gutted).  Made it about 50 yards and we could see that wasn't going to happen.  So, he hiked back to his house to get his 3 wheeler (this was back in the 80's when everyone had 3 wheelers instead of quads).  We piled the deer on the back seat and tried driving up the hill, but it was so steep we flipped it over.  Tried sidehilling, but just tipped over sideways.  We finally flipped it over so many times that we flooded it, and it wouldn't start.  So, we cut the buck in half.  He took the front half, I took the back half (he wanted to leave the cape intact, so we didn't remove the head) and carried that beast out of there.  It took us the rest of the day.  Of course, looking back on it now, we should have quartered it and humped it out that way, but we were both 16, it was the first deer either of us had shot "on our own", and we had no clue what we were doing.  He shot that buck at first light, and we didn't have it hung in the barn until well after dark. 

[Pathfinder101]

BTW, I am with you Yelp.  This is how we roll now...

[Skyvalhunter]

Won't work in the areas I hunt.

[Pathfinder101]

Won't work in the areas I hunt.

Wouldn't have worked in the area where my buddy shot his buck in my story either.  But it sure is nice in open country, or if you can find a horse trail in the mountains.  That picture was from last fall in Montana.  We figured we put 12 miles on that deer cart by the time the season was over...

[Woodchuck]

ok, here goes
      in 08 elk hunting with my nephew, sitting on a fairly steep hillside watching two meadows, a lone spike comes wandering toward me, as he turns to head down hill i let him have it, as soon as he piled, i grabbed my radio and yelled that we had a spike down, as the words are coming out my mouth, here comes his spike brother, so my nephew steps out from behind me and lets him have it, the second was standing on very steep ground and he went tumbling....ALOT. so we start to move toward my elk as it was closer, he decides that it was a good time to go into his death thrash, and a tumbling he goes....ALOT. so we wander on down to the edge of hell where two dead elk lay within 50 yds of each other and i begin the task of field dressing one elk, it is at this point i tell my tell my nephew to hand me the bone saw i told him him to put in his pack before we left camp...i get the oops blank stare from him , so with my trusty lock back knife and a rock i begin. this task could not have been done any better by circus performers, my poor nephew trying to stop it fom sliding, me trying to prevent my self from being drug to death by a renegade dead elk. after finishing that one we moved to the next and it is at this point i decided it was gonna be a better idea to try to drag them whole down to a 4-wheeler trail   so i begin the task of shale wrestling with the second elk by his time my trusty knife was becoming not so trusty and nearly had to use the rock to bash the blade through his hide , i look up and see the other guys in the party standing above me, them still being on the upside of hell, shaking their heads at me, now looking like charlie manson had kicked me out of the family for being too violent . we begin to drag one down the hill and then crawling back to the other because in my wisdom i had convinced them it was a good idea to only make one trip down, the part about making lots of little ups balancing out to be about the same as one long up somehow slipped my mind   . as we slide these elk down every so often they would have a little more steam than us, so we let em slide, of couse every time they stop, it is tangled up brush etc, one dropped into an unseen 4ft deep little gully . at this point i overhear the rest of the guys plotting my early demise. only took us about 5 hours to drag those two little spikes the approx 700 yards to the trail where one of the grandpas met us with the 4-wheeler and the truck and away we go. we shot those elk at about 8:30 in the morning, had em hung just shy of 8 that night, what a great day. i kinda shy away from that spot these days  

[BLUEBULLS]

My worst was last year late muzzleloader. My wife, who was over 5 months pregnant shot a doe 2 miles in. Don't ask me what we were doing hunting for a doe 2 miles in. anyways, I didn't want her to help and it was freezing cold and raining with a 25mph headwind. I had a poker game I really wanted to get back to so I was pushing it a bit. I drug that stupid doe for 1-1/2 miles up a gradual hill pretty much non-stop. By far the most physically exhausting thing I've ever done. Especially with my pregnant wife out there under dressed and freezing. We ended up walking to the rig and getting a hold of the farmer who said "go ahead and drive on down there, thanks for asking"

[Austrian Hunter]

Never drug a deer, have always packed them out.

But my worst drag ever on an animal was a caribou. A friend and I were hunting in Alaska around the Tok area. Was in January on a registration hunt. It was about 25 below zero. We drove all up and down the road trying to find some caribou passing through. Well no luck with that. So we found a snow mobile trail heading off on the right side and in we went. About 2 miles in, we could see some caribou in the tree line so we laid down and watched them for about 45 minutes. You could only shoot males and they had no horns so you had to watch for the willies on them. We both got one picked out and at same time shot and dropped two caribou. Got over to them gutted them out. And then tied roopes to one dragged it for about 500 feet came back and got the other one. We kept flipflopping the caribou until I looked over and noticed there was slack in my buddies rope. That is when I figures out his behind was slacking when we were pulling together. So decided the best course of action was to pull them seperately. So we started doing that. A 250-275 pound animal across four feet of snow was no fun. About a mile into the pull is when the wolves started fricken howling. So we kind of knew we were probably not doing the right thing. Anyways kept puling them until I got to the road I was about 500 yards in front of Danny. I was in the ditch getting my breath back when this old time pulled up and jumped out of his truck to make sure I was ok. I was other than sweating my butt off and dehydrated. So he gave me a hand we got the caribou in the truck and then I waited for Danny to get there. He got there got caribou in the truck . And that is when the real adventure began. Hunting in Alaska in never just hunting it is always a survival/adventure but that is another story. So my worst drag ever was a fricken caribou in Alaska at 25 below zero through 4 feet of snow. I told myself from that day on no matter what I kill if I can't see the truck it gets quartered and packed out and I have yet to drag anything to the truck.

Joe

Cool story, would love to hear the other adventure when you went into the truck! 

[vandeman17]

My worst drag was bad, but memorable at the same time. My old man and I were elk and deer hunting in Montana and hadn't been seeing many elk as the weather was breaking records for how warm it was. We were seeing tons of deer and had been watching a herd of deer with a nice old 3x3 in it. We decided that if it was still there the next day that we would go after it. Sure enough, the next day they were on the same hillside so we drove drove around the backside of the hill they were on and snuck up behind them. Once we got on top of the hill we realized that there was still a ways until we got to the ridge they were on. Long story short, we snuck up on them, found the 3x3 and I let him have it. That is when the work began. To get to where we parked the truck, we would have had to drag the deer probably a quarter mile or so up the hill we had came over. We decided to bring him down hill towards where we had spotted him from. It was a steep @$$ hillside with shallow but pretty damn wide creek running at the bottom. Being the hill was so steep we had to side hill the gutted buck so that he didn't take us out as he started to roll. Finally after about two hours of dragging and cussing we had him at the edge of the creek. It was probably about 30-40 yards wide and about thigh deep or so. We ended up hooking a rope to his rack, getting down to our underwear and floating him across to the other side. As I mentioned, the weather was warm but that means nothing to water temperature in mid november. Lucky for me I am 6'1" so the water never touched my boys but my dad is a few inches shorter and he had a little harder time of it.   We finally got him over, and drug the last little ways to the truck just as the sun was going down!

[Pathfinder101]

By the way... what a GREAT idea for a thread topic...

[Alchase]

My worst was not really much of a drag (by me anyway) and only about 200 yds from my truck. Back in the 80s, I was hunting by myself during the late hunt above Huckleberry creek. I shot a 3x2 on the opposite side of a creek with out really thinking about it. The creek was only about 20 feet a crossed and did not "look" to deep, but flowing pretty darn fast. I was able to cross to the buck without getting too wet. Dressed him out then attempted to cross back while dragging the buck on a harness. I know, looking back it was pretty stupid, but at the time it seemed like the thing to do....
Anyway, I got about 1/3 the way a crossed and all heck broke loose. I lost my footing when I stepped into a deep whole at the same time the buck decided to head downstream at a fast rate of speed and over backwards I went. After the intitail cold shock I could not stop laughing at my stupidity long enough to get my feet back under me. It seemed like a forever long distance floating downstream head first on my back, in reality it was only about 30 feet. When I was finally able to get my feet under me, the bank was to high for me to climb out of the creek bed. I had to push and pull the deer downstream to a low spot. Both the buck and I were soaked to the bone. The only smart thing I did was leave my rifle and pack leaning against a tree before I crossed the creak. By the time I dragged it back to my truck, I was to tired and cold to lift it in the bed of my truck. I had to climb in the cab took off most of my wet clothes and cranked up the heat.  Luckily I had another coat and sweatshirt in the truck. It took me about 30 min. before I was warm enough to stop shivering and get the buck in the bed.

I guess you could say the buck dragged me, lol