Buck Shows Up on Trail Camera Footage With Large Wound

Every hunter knows whitetail deer are tough. If you have some hunting experience under your belt, odds are you’ve seen a deer or two with more grit than you would’ve ever expected. Well, a viral trail camera video is making us again reevaluate that perseverance.

A few years ago, a trail camera captured a short video that made its viral rounds across the Internet. It features a large whitetail buck, which is noteworthy it its own right, but it’s not the antlers that are garnering all the attention, but rather the massive wound on the deer’s back. No one can figure out how this deer is still alive and walking in this video. We’ll warn you, though, it is a pretty ghastly wound.

We have almost no words for this one. We thought we had seen it all when it comes to what a deer can survive, but this simply raises the bar. You can literally see this animal’s shoulder blade moving up and down as he walks, and his backstraps look to be missing from one side. You’d think the blood loss alone from a wound like this should have killed the animal, so how is it still walking around like it’s totally fine. After a little bit of digging, we discovered a hunter named Chris Evans captured this clip in Illinois.

A short post on the Meateater blog notes that the buck was healthy and fine back in September before suddenly showing up looking like an undead nightmare.

The two popular leading theories on how the buck got hurt are are a collision with a vehicle on the road, or more popularly, that the buck was hit by a combine, but we’ll never know for sure. Another video later appeared on the same channel showing the buck’s head after it was later found dead. But, man, what a beautiful buck to have such a tragic ending.

For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.