As time marches on and we gain knowledge, we often find that things we once believed to be true are, in fact, not. A graphic example were the once-inviolate beliefs that the world was flat, or that the sun revolved around the earth.
While perhaps not as earth shattering, a generation ago the dogma was that when you hit a deer or other big-game animal with an arrow, you were to wait a specified amount of time before taking up the trail – especially if the shot was thought to be outside the vitals. We know now that if you hit an animal in a large muscle group, your best chance of recovery is to, in fact, immediately take up the trail and force the animal to keep moving and the blood pumping.
The same is true when you hit an animal right at dark. It was thought that, unless a massive blood
