This Happened to Me: I Severed My Artery While Quartering an Elk and Almost Bled Out on the Mountain

We were seven days into an Idaho elk hunt when my buddy Mitch and I decided to split up. Usually, we hunt together, but we were having a hard time finding elk, so Mitch headed for the front side of the mountain, and I decided to hike in six miles from the trailhead to a spot where I’d killed a nice bull a few years before. I took off early on Sept. 25, leaving the tent around 3:30 a.m. I knew it was going to be a hard two-hour hike to get to where I wanted to be. 

When I got there, I immediately heard bugling. I dropped down over a ridge and laid eyes on a dandy six-point. He had a couple of rag horns, about eight cows, and another decent five-point with him. It was only about 30 minutes after daybreak, but there wasn’t much cover, so I decided to stalk them with my cow decoy. I managed to get within 60 yards of the big bull, but he stayed behind some cows, and I could never get a clear shot. 

They knew something was up and started to work away from me, so I tried to get out in front of them. I decided if I could get a shot on the five-point, I would take it — considering how tough the hunting had been, I’d be happpy to shoot him. Suddenly, I saw the smaller bull looking over his shoulder at me. I grabbed my rangefinder and ranged him at 72 yards. He took two more steps, and I had an open shot. I flung my arrow and hit him right in the heart. He didn’t go 40 yards. 

Killing an elk with a bow on your own is an incredible amount of work. It’s all mentally, emotionally, and physically draining. But when you do finally punch your tag, you experience a high like no other. 

After I took a bunch of photos with my phone, it was time to get down to business. I got my backpack, unloaded everything, and stripped down to a T-shirt. I used a replaceable-blade knife to cut off the hide off one side of the bull, folding it back and laying it fur-side down to make a table, which would prevent the meat from getting dirty. I did half of the bull, deboned the quarters, put the meat in the game bags, and set them in the shade. 

Next, I swapped out the old, dull blade for a shiny, new one and got to work on the other side. I had the bull’s left front leg up under my left arm to keep it up and out of the way while I cut the hide up the leg. I was cutting toward me like a fool, and because I was using a brand new blade, it sliced through that tough hide like butter and across my forearm. 

My first thought was, “Damn, that hurt.” I dropped the knife and immediately grabbed my arm. I figured I would probably need stitches, but I planned to wrap the cut in a game bag, finish cutting up my elk, and then get back down the mountain to camp. 

But as soon as I took my hand away, blood squirted over my left shoulder. I could see the artery and could tell that it was cut entirely in two. In a moment of panic, I started running. My mind told me I needed to get back to camp as fast as possible. 

My adrenaline was in high gear as I ran almost straight uphill. With my heart racing 100 miles an hour, the wound was just pouring blood from underneath my hand. Then, the rational side of my brain took over, and I quickly realized if I tried to run back to camp, I’d likely bleed out. 

I stopped, stood still, and took a few breaths to calm my body. Then I slowly walked back to my elk. My stuff was all over the ground, including my belt, which I had taken off to get to my knife. I grabbed the belt, wound it around my bicep, and tightened it down as much as possible to improvise a tourniquet. Because I was working with one hand, I couldn’t get it tight enough. My arm was still squirting blood with every heartbeat. 

I was fighting to stay calm and trying to figure out what to do next when I saw my knife and my yellow lighter lying on the ground. 

“That’s my next step,” I thought to myself. “I’ve got to cauterize this artery.”

I took the knife and held my left forearm as tight to my ribs as I could to slow the bleeding. I had the knife with my left hand, lit the lighter with my right hand, and heated the blade until it was glowing orange. Then, I dropped the lighter, grabbed the knife with my right hand, took my injured arm off of my rib cage, and went to put the hot blade on the wound to sear it. But there was so much blood I couldn’t see what I was doing. 

I was worried that I could potentially cut myself even more by trying to sear the wound with the sharp blade. So I spit on the blade a few times, hearing it sizzle as it cooled off. I removed the disposable blade and reheated the clip. When it was good and hot, I pulled my left arm off of my rib cage and turned it over to pour the blood out of the wound. Then, I raised it over my head and looked at the wound from underneath. The artery was squirting blood just as plain as day. I just pressed the metal to the artery, and the bleeding immediately stopped. 

“Oh my god, this is perfect,” I said aloud. 

I felt calmer and was thinking more rationally at this point. I figured it was okay to head back to camp, because my arm wasn’t bleeding. I left the meat, my pack, and my bow and started slowly hiking toward base camp. I walked through a massive blood trail from where I had started running in panic. It was pretty gruesome. 

I had hiked about 150 yards up the mountain with my injured arm pressed against my rib cage when I started to feel something warm and wet running down the inside of my pant leg. I looked down and my pants were covered in blood. As I climbed and my heart rate kept increasing, the pressure had unsealed the cauterization. Blood was spraying everywhere again.

I had left my pack and all my supplies — my knife, my lighter, the game bags, everything — back with my elk. I had zero cell service on the mountain. 

Then something that happened two days before saved my life. 

Mitch and I had been sitting at camp just shooting the shit. We were talking about how we couldn’t find even a single bar of service anywhere. In years past, we could sometimes find a signal when we were up high, just enough to send the kids a quick message. But this time, we’d had nothing the whole trip.

“If you ever get in trouble and need help, you can use the Emergency SOS on your iPhone to text emergency services via satellite.”

“Huh? I didn’t know that.”

“You idiot,” Mitch said and then showed me the steps to send an SOS.

Now, bleeding out on the side of the mountain, I remembered that conversation with Mitch. I fumbled through the steps, accidentally turned off my phone, then turned it back on again, before finally getting the feature up. But my phone was unable to connect to a satellite.  

“That’s not good.”

I walked about 75 yards up the trail to get out from under some trees, then dropped to my knees, tried to calm my heart rate, and tried again. Nothing.

Another 200 yards up the mountain still didn’t get me a signal, so I walked the rest of the way to the top. When I got there, I dropped to my knees, crying like a little school kid. I knew I was not getting off that mountain if I couldn’t get it to work. I tried again and got nothing. 

I sat down and swallowed my pill. I decided to make a video for my three children. I tried to keep most of the blood out of the video and stayed calm as I told them I loved them, but there was blood all over my face, and my shirt was saturated. When I finished the video, I decided to try to send an SOS one last time. 

This time, I went through the steps and received a text back.

“You are now connected to Lemhi County Sheriff 911. What is the address of your emergency?”

I only had one hand, and it was applying pressure to a gushing wound. I put the phone on the ground, leaned down on my elbows, and, while pressing on the wound with my right hand, I used my index finger on the same hand to type out a message and hit send. I managed one word.

“Help.”

When there was no immediate response, it took me another 3 minutes to manage another text. 

“Cut bad. Main artery. In mountains.”

A dispatcher immediately clarified my injury, told me to apply pressure, and asked for my location. I used onX to send her my exact location. 

“Do you need Life Flight?”

“Need flight. Hurry,” was all I could manage to text back.

The dispatcher, Lindsey, and I exchanged texts for over an hour while waiting for Life Flight to reach me. Text exchanges became easier when I realized I could use voice-to-text and hit send. 

“Whatever you do, don’t go to sleep,” Lindsey texted.

“LOL. I think that’s about the last thing I will be doing.”

“No, Henry. You have to stay awake. When you lose a lot of blood, you start to get tired. If you fall asleep, you will lose pressure on your wound and you will bleed out.”

I was determined to stay awake, but after about 40 minutes, I felt my head nod, and things started getting blurry. Lindsey said the chopper was 22 minutes away. It got to the point where I could barely read Lindsey’s incoming texts, because I couldn’t focus my eyes. On top of that, my phone screen was covered in sticky blood. 

The helicopter arrived more than an hour after my SOS went through. I was relieved when I saw it coming up over the mountain until it flew right over top of me, kept going, and then disappeared. I messaged Lindsey that they passed me and to have them turn around. It came right back over the same course, flying not 50 feet above my head, and flew right past me a second time. I realized they couldn’t see me because I was dressed in camo (Sitka Open Country) and sitting in sagebrush the exact same color as my clothing. I knew I needed to do something to get their attention, so I tried to stand up and wave them down. My legs wouldn’t work. 

It was starting to feel like I was in an awful movie, that they wouldn’t find me. I was afraid I was going to die on that mountain, sitting in a pool of my own blood. On the chopper’s fourth pass over me, I managed to kick off my boots and shake my feet in the air. They finally spotted my black socks fluttering against the gray shades of the landscape. The chopper immediately turned and touched down about 60 yards away from me. Emergency medical service personnel came running over and asked me if I could stand. I couldn’t, so they almost dragged me to the helicopter. Once I was there, they pumped 3 ½ units of blood into my body. Within minutes, I was feeling better and knew I would live. 

I could literally see my game bags full of my elk in them from where I was lying in the chopper. I turned to look at the pilot, who had a badass mullet, and told him, “Hey, you see those white bags? That’s clean, deboned elk meat. Can you run down there and grab that?”

“Maybe if you weren’t so damn tall I could fit that bag in here with us, but we need to get the hell out of here and get you to the hospital.”

Life Flight took me to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center. On the 30-minute ride there, they put a real tourniquet on my arm. That was the most pain I’d ever felt in my entire life. I thought it was going to break my arm. 

When the doctor at the hospital removed the tourniquet and unwrapped the wound, it squirted blood 9 feet across the examining room. 

That’s when the doctor said, “We need to get him into surgery. Now.”

My cut was only2 ½ inches long in the middle of my forearm, but it was so deep you could see bone. The surgeon had to extend that cut to my wrist and to my elbow to reattach severed tendons. After the first surgery, the doctor told me he wasn’t sure if he could save the arm. He told me to prepare for the worst, that the next couple of days would determine whether or not he would have to cut my arm off at the elbow. 

GRAPHIC IMAGE WARNING

I spent four days in the hospital before undergoing a second surgery. Meanwhile, Lemhi County Sheriff John Bennett, whom I had met in the mountains four days before my injury, headed out to my base camp with two deputies to let Mitch know what was going on. They also brought out my elk. 

Read Next: I Was Lost for 6 Days with No Food or Fire in the Idaho Backcountry

I would end up undergoing another surgery, and the doctors saved my arm. All I could do for a month was sit at home to recover. I’m a very active guy, and sitting around tanked my morale. I was in a total funk. That’s when I realized I just needed to get back on the damn horse. So I called my buddies in Missouri and we went hunting. On October 31, just over a month after the injury, I shot a nice buck with my bow. It was exactly what I needed. 

But my buddy had to clean that for me. It’s going to take a while for me to be okay with knives again.