Wounded buck fatally skewers hunter who took it down

A wounded buck is still on the loose after allegedly goring to death the hunter who shot him, Arkansas wildlife officials said Thursday.

Experienced hunter Thomas Alexander, 66, took down a deer near Yellville, Arkansas, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission officials said.

When he returned to dress it, it leaped up and skewered him with its antlers.

“I don’t know how long he left it there, but he went up to check it to make sure it was dead,” commission spokesman Keith Stephens told KYTV-TV. “And evidently it wasn’t.”

Several puncture wounds on his body

Alexander was able to call for help and was conscious when emergency personnel got there, reported WOFL-TV, but stopped breathing and died by the time he arrived at the hospital.

“He apparently went over to the buck and it got up and attacked him,” Stephens told KYTV, noting that the hunter “had several puncture wounds on his body.”

It’s not uncommon for wounded deer to injure their human attackers, the commission’s Corp. Joe Dale Purdom told CNN. But he said it was the first time he’d seen such an attack be fatal. More usual is for the deer to jump up and run away.

There was some question as to whether the antler wounds themselves were the cause of death, or whether something else such as a heart attack had killed him, KYTV noted.

Nonetheless, there were no plans for an autopsy, Stephens said, “so we may never know what actually happened.”