Darby, a two-year-old English Pointer, is stitched up and recovering after taking a broadhead-tipped arrow through her armpit while chasing birds Saturday.
The injury happened north of WaKeeney, Kansas, where Rusty Ullery was hunting a public walk-in area with Darby. They were joined by Ullery’s son, two friends, and a few other bird dogs, and the group started walking after sunrise. They were thirty minutes into working a draw on some CRP land, and they’d already flushed a half dozen pheasants, all hens. Next, they found a covey of quail, and Darby went on point. The hunters fired. Two birds folded. Darby howled.
“I just happened to tone her at the same instant she started screaming,” Ullery tells Outdoor Life. “I thought I had accidentally shocked her and wasn’t meaning to, but I don’t use shock. All I use is tone, so it was really weird.”
Rusty’s son, nicknamed Deuce because he has the same name as his father, reached Darby first. Deuce suspected a broken leg based on what was sticking out of Darby’s body. But it was uglier than that.
“I thought she ran into a stick,” Ullery says. “I reach to pull it out and she screams because she doesn’t want me to touch it. I look underneath her and see an arrow.”
Ullery’s best guess is that Darby unknowingly stepped on the arrow at the nock end, lifting the sharp tip off the ground. When Darby turned to retrieve the quail, the arrow stuck into her body near where her left front leg and chest meet. The shaft then snapped into two pieces. Ullery carried her 300 yards to the truck.
He says they were in the middle of nowhere with poor cell service, so the group frantically Googled veterinary clinics while driving toward civilization. An hour later, they found Dr. Brandon Weidenhaft at Big Creek Veterinary Services in Hays, Kansas.
“It was absolutely nerve-racking,” Ullery says. “Not knowing what damage had been done inside and where that arrow went. In the picture I took in the truck on the way to vet, she looks super scared. We were all super scared, but she was really calm.”
Doctor Weidenhaft was calm, too. He assessed the injury and sedated the dog. Then he removed the broadhead, cleaned the hole and stitched it shut. He said he’d never seen an injury like it in his 25-year career. He sent Darby and Ullery on their way with antibiotics and pain pills, and they carried on with their hunt while Darby rested.
“Darby stayed in her box while we hunted [Sunday],” he says. “Every time we stopped between fields, I would get her out to stretch and do whatever she wanted. She can’t really talk, but I could tell she was a little upset because she didn’t get to hunt with us. If we took our eyes off her for 30 seconds, she would run up a draw to hunt.”
The vet also gave Ullery the broadhead, but the nock end is still laying in the field somewhere. Ullery has no doubt that the arrow was left there on accident, and not intentionally. But he does wish all bow hunters would consider using illuminated nocks to make retrieving lost arrows easier.
“I wasn’t mad at all when it happened and I’m still not mad. Maybe disappointed that it happened, but it was a freak accident. Catching a broadhead to the chest area is just wild,” says Ullery, who has hunted birds for 35 years. “There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens with bird dogs. If you haven’t seen something weird happen with a bird dog, you haven’t hunted much.”
Read Next: Carolina Man Who Saved His Duck Dog from a Gator’s Jaws Says He’d Do It Again in a Heartbeat
Darby is “well on her way to recovery,” Ullery says, and she’s stationed on her bed in his office this week while the stitches seal the wound. She’ll probably stay at home through the weekend, but their hunting season isn’t over.
“We’ll hunt. We’re not packing it in. She doesn’t want to pack it in, and I don’t feed bird dogs 10 months out of the year to not hunt them. I want to give them their best life out there, chasing as many birds as we can.”
Read the full article here
