No, this isn’t a story about a deer that was somehow lacking courage or vitality. It is literally about a white-tailed deer that was, well, lacking its guts.
Actually all of it guts.
It’s crazy, but it’s true, and it’s one of the first articles I wrote for Deer & Deer Hunting when I joined the staff 27 years ago.
This story originates from the deer woods of Pennsylvania. Back in those days, we didn’t have the Internet or cell phones. We relied on freelance writers for most of our articles, but we also did old-fashioned reporting when readers sent us letters or, gasp, called us on the landline telephone. Google that if you have to, but yeah it was a “thing.”
Anyway, I was fresh out of my newspaper days, and I admittedly put a heck of a lot more fact-checking and work into getting every story right. Imagine my suspicions when I got a phone call from one dedicated reader who insisted he shot … and then found … a deer that had completely lost its guts in the process. I didn’t believe it at first, but after interviewing him several times, I knew he was telling the truth.
This is the story as he told it to me in the fall of 1995:
The hunter, Spiros Stathopoulos and his girlfriend, Christine Rook, took to the woods one day that season, hoping to fill several doe tags. The two hunters decided to hunt a remote area that held a lot of deer. They were sitting back-to-back on a rock formation, each facing thick brush with few openings, when, at 8 a.m., Stathopoulos noticed three does heading straight toward him. He waited, hoping they would turn, and he would get a broadside shot at the lead doe. Unfortunately, the deer spotted Stathopoulos and stopped in their tracks.
“Raising my rifle very slowly, I placed the lead doe’s chest in my cross-hairs, and realized it’s now or never,” he said. “As I fired, the doe jumped as if she was hit by a jolt of electricity.”
The doe sprinted into the cover, but Stathopoulos thought he heard it pile up shortly thereafter. Although startled, the other two deer moved only 10 yards after the shot. Thinking he could go two-for-two, Stathopoulos placed his cross-hairs on one of the other deer, squeezed the trigger. This deer dropped it in its tracks.
After a high-five and an emotional hug, the couple went to retrieve the deer. With the second doe in sight, they decided to find and mark the blood trail of the first doe. They saw some kicked up leaves and dirt where the doe fled, but no blood.
Seeing this might take a while, Stathopoulos and Rook decided to mark the spot and return to the second deer. They quickly field dressed the doe and dragged it to the trail that led back to their vehicle.
It started to rain lightly by the time they returned to the spot where Stathopoulos hit the first doe, which had both hunters concerned. Although they searched on their hands and knees, neither hunter could find blood. However, they did find proof that Stathopoulos hit the deer.
“We found cud,” he said, indicating the doe was gut-shot. “So, instead of looking for red, we were looking for green.”
It took the hunters 2 1⁄2 hours to follow the trail 150 yards before they found another tell-tale sign. This sign, however, was unlike any either hunter had ever run across while trailing a wounded deer.
In an opening in the forest, the trail of stomach fluids led them to a large in-tact gut pile, including the large and small intestines and rumen.
“For a second, I thought all we do now is look around there she’ll be laying,” Stathopoulos said. “Well, to our surprise, no deer was to be seen anywhere. And, to top this off, now there’s no cud to follow.
“We looked at each other waiting for the other to say anything that would make sense. Here we had a situation that we couldn’t put the puzzle together.”
Still following the trail of overturned leaves and hoofprints, numerous questions could have popped into the hunters’ heads:
How is it possible for a deer to run without half of its organs?
How could its intestines fall out of its body without the animal bleeding profusely?
How far could the deer run without its organs?
Instead of giving up, they plodded on without saying any words.
“All we wanted is to see something bright white or brown laying motionless,” Stathopoulos said.
The day-long ordeal ended when, several hours after darkness set in, they decided to mark their spot and resume tracking in the morning.
After a sleepless night, the two hunters arrived back at the site at daybreak.“As I stood on top of that spot, I momentarily replayed in my head, ‘Where would a deer go after all it has been through?’” Stathopoulos said. “Then I noticed a very thick line of brush and rhododendrons separating the woods and a creek. It was as if they were not there the day before. ”
Stathopoulos looked at Rook. Without a word, they knew where the deer made its death run. They headed straight for the thicket.
“As we got closer, I realized I could not go through this mess,” he said.
The hunters didn’t let the mass of tangled brush deter them. And, just as they were halfway through the thicket, they found the doe laying in a small opening.
“Before we touched the deer, I had Christine take a picture of myself and the deer exactly how we found it.”
While examining the doe, the hunters immediately knew why it lost its intestines while running. The bullet had shaved the doe’s belly, making a 12-inch incision down the middle of its stomach.
And, although it took the hunters parts of two days to find the deer, it hardly suffered. The doe had traveled only a few hundred yards from where Stathopoulos shot it.After staring in disbelief for a few minutes, the hunters claimed their hard-earned prize.
